Decatur (6 page)

CHAPTER ELEVEN
Rowley’s Intuition

The rain had finally stopped and the sunset was like buried gold in the thick grey clouds. The ugly modern streetlights weren’t on yet and Marilyn was waiting for Max just outside the restaurant doors in the amber light cast by the carriage-style fixtures that marked the Surrey’s entrance. Moths were already gathering and Marilyn’s cigarette smoke wafted up and their wings fluttered in a veil of yellow light. The pale green ’66 Impala came down the street slowly without headlights on and stopped across the street, almost a half a block down from the Surrey. The lights flashed once.
Good,
thought Marilyn,
this one’s smart, no need to advertise their relationship, it would just cause more talk.
She sprinted for the car before Scott could see out the front blinds where she went.

“I’ve been thinking about our last session and I had a dream last night. I’ve had it before too. It was funny, though because I think this is the first time I really knew that I’ve had it before.” she said as Max steered the car slowly away from downtown towards the neighborhoods both fancy and shabby that extended west ending in Charlesworth campus.

“Recurring dreams are usually about things deeply imbedded in your unconscious. What was it?” he asked, looking in the rear view mirror.

“Why don’t you help me walk Rowley and I’ll take you some place where I’ve spent a lot of time. That way I can kinda work up to it to spilling all this personal stuff. It’s hard for me but I’ve got to try, right?” Marilyn pulled her cherry red cashmere cardigan tight around her black rayon uniform. The pearl buttoned sweater was straight out of the sixties but far better than anything she could have afforded new. Marilyn often shopped the garage sales in the four blocks of well-cared-for large older homes that bordered the poorer dilapidated North Street where her duplex was.

Max parked the car in front of the white clapboard house where Marilyn lived upstairs. The houses were jammed together with little side yards running like borders between them. There weren’t a lot of trees, but sticker bushes seemed to be in front of every porch. The ugly streetlights on the corners came on making freakish shadows of low-hanging wires that crisscrossed the streets. You could hear basketballs bouncing on concrete now that the rain had stopped and through open windows smell a pungent weekday mix of cabbage and ham or chicken with Lipton onion soup mix and noodles cooking, along with the sounds of the Chicago White Sox game coming over the radios and TV’s.

Marilyn used an old skeleton key to open the door to the duplex, it was a grainy walnut door with a round of glass and a very tired lace curtain stretched over it. The porch light made a little circle on the grey floorboards and Marilyn’s beautiful black wavy hair fell across her face as she opened the door. The contrast between her vibrant lush body barely contained in the red cardigan and black uniform, with the red, red lips and the mean, used-up neighborhood was not lost on Max. He felt almost like he was high again, a really good high where you realize how the sweet and the bitter make life worth living. The stairs were steep that lead up to Marilyn’s door and the hallway was covered in a faded green-grey wallpaper with garlands of yellow flowers. As they came into the hallway a dog barked twice and there was an angry thump from the inside of the door leading to the downstairs apartment. Marilyn bounded up the stairs, “Sssh, Sssh. Rowley, no barking.”

In a flash she had her own door open and she knelt down and buried her face into the dog’s white diamond marking on his chest. Rowley’s eyes were tawny and they looked in a not unfriendly way over Marilyn’s head to Max, sizing him up. She flipped a light on and before Max could come in she had a leash in her hand and had tossed her fake leather handbag on a sofa with a fringed orange cover.

Back on the street with Rowley on the leash they crossed North Street and made their way over to the more graceful homes on West William Street leading to Charlesworth Place. Marilyn liked to pretend that this was really where she lived in Decatur, Illinois. There were elm, oak and pine trees planted here, large lawns with big borders of peony bushes along the red and yellow brick houses and, as you got to Charlesworth Place, a Frank Lloyd Wright home on the corner. Marilyn let Rowley off the leash to scamper in the park-like atmosphere of the grounds of the Charlesworth mansion, a late Victorian brick beauty with a square tower, a sweeping graveled circular drive and beautiful wrought iron streetlights marking the entrance with big white globes of light.

“You ever been here?” asked Marilyn, “It’s me and Rowley’s favorite place except for maybe Fairview Cemetery.”

“You can just go in?” Max asked. “Isn’t it private property?”

“I don’t know. I guess maybe now it’s the University’s but every night after work it’s me and Rowley’s.” The dog, hearing his name, ran up to Marilyn and barked happily, glad to be out of the apartment with the wet grass brushing his ankles and the smell of her in his nostrils along with a satisfying moosh of neighborhood dog pee, broken robin’s egg, and the flowering big magnolia in front of the closed-up house.

“Some people think this place is haunted,” she offered as the moon came out of the clouds just above the top turret of the mansion.

“And you?” Max asked as she whistled for Rowley.

“I’ve seen things here. My mother used to clean house for J.J., the son of the Charlesworth that built this place along with your college. Mother always called him an odd duck. She was right. It was like he was stuck between the centuries, wearing an old fashioned morning jacket and big black bow tie. He collected peculiar things from all over the world and was very particular about them.” She paused biting her lip and then plunged on, “His young wife committed suicide when I was eight.”

“That’s sad.” Max said looking at the big house and thinking you just never knew what went on inside of people’s heads.

“She was found drowned in the goldfish pond only they called it something else, something classy sounding.”

“She drowned in a koi pond?” Max supplied.

“That’s it. It was a big pond. I’ll show you, around the back. C’mon, Rowley.” She called and the dog fell in immediately at her heel. They moved in the moonlight to the rear of the mansion with its big darkened rear porch looking out over a large expanse of lawn in shades of grey illuminated by the moon and the house’s Victorian street lamps. The dog and Marilyn moved with easy familiarity towards the center of the lawn where a large deep hole ringed with stones stood. The koi pond was easily twenty feet wide and even with the bottom layered in leaves and twigs, looked to be seven or eight feet deep. Marilyn could feel the seeping darkness of the Charlesworth mansion strongest there except for the one place inside, the place she never got back to.

“He had it drained when she died,” Marilyn said softly looking down into the pond’s dry stone bottom. “I told you J.J. was odd; his father was a real Bible thumper, but J.J., he had a fascination with what he called the other side of the divine. Went all over the world collecting things that I think it might have disturbed his child bride right into this pond and he changed after that and finally one day just got in the car and drove away. It was one of his theories, as above so below he would say. He used to talk to me especially after Mrs. Charlesworth died. They say the pond will fill back up on its own if…” She broke off.

“If what, Marilyn?” Max asked as Rowley prowled the edge of the dry pond nervously.

There was a pause, and Max felt Marilyn struggling to form the words.

“If the infernity gets too strong,” she finally managed almost in a gasp as she tried to prevent the old memories from rushing back in.

“Infernity? I’m not sure I’ve ever heard that term. And who says?” Max asked carefully, walking around of edges of drained koi pond feeling Marilyn’s mood like one might little quakes on a Richter scale, noticing how the dog was sticking close and sniffing the air.

“ J.J. said. It was one of his words.” Marilyn replied thinking that her mother’s employer didn’t just say it, he predicted it, leaning in close to Marilyn, his voice gruff and eyes intense.

“Do you think that?” Max asked.

“I think the world is a mysterious place. That’s the one thing the Church has right. You just can’t explain everything.”

“No.” Max had to restrain himself for reaching for her then, she was so vulnerable and yet she had a power in her, a magnetic pull.

“Let’s go,” Marilyn said suddenly and they walked briskly back to the front of the place. The trees were rustling in the evening breeze with the three quarters moon throwing sharp shadows on the lawn and everything had an edge to it. As they passed a massive weeping pine Max could almost imagine the young wife’s moans as the wind sawed through the branches. Back behind the house, the koi pond felt the wet trickle begin and rejoiced in a hateful way,
fill me full,
it whispered to itself,
grow a mighty stream
, as one thin line of water sprouted like a crack in the old stone floor.
Something had come to Decatur at last
;
the one who grew up on the grounds, she was drawing it close and it was time to get the dark full.

As they got to the edges of the grounds, Marilyn turned to face Max, biting her bottom lip and hair waving in the night breeze. “I want to go back to the Map Room, Max. I can feel something going on, it’s everywhere tonight. We can just bring Rowley with us, right?”

Max didn’t know if it was alright or not, but he didn’t care. Everything felt so real and urgent now. His life was restarting again in the most unlikely of places.

They pulled into the guest parking space in front of the old Arts and Sciences building. Rowley hopped right out of the front seat, Marilyn put the leash on him and led him up to the door like bringing a dog in a building was the most natural thing in the world. The doors were open as a few evening classes were still going on but Max was pretty sure that the Map Room would be deserted again. In part to keep the familiar anxiety at bay as he broke what he was sure were campus rules against bringing animals into campus buildings, Max pressed Marilyn to tell him about her dream as they climbed the three flights to the Map Room.

“I’ve had it before, but like I said this was the first time I was positive I’d had it.” she said as Rowley pulled ahead of them up the stairs. “It’s more of a nightmare really.”

“Perhaps our last session brought it further up in your consciousness,” murmured Max, glad that Rowley wasn’t a yapper as he heard a class on the second floor letting out with the familiar sounds of thudding student feet, chatter about notes, quizzes and that night’s lecture.

“It’s pretty simple, really. I’m always somewhere I’ve never been but it seems weirdly familiar, like in a train car only an old fashioned kind, or once in a cart, or like last night on a ghostly boat. Anyway, I’m always looking back over my shoulder because something’s coming for me and I’m afraid in the dream that no matter how far I go it’ll keep on coming.”

“Recurring dreams are often clues about our inner state or even past lives, although I don’t how much credence the Catholic Church would give that,” he said with a smile as he opened the door to the Map Room, which was empty. Rowley went right in and jumped on one of the cracked green leather chairs as Max turned on the library table lamp. “When we came here before you pointed out places that you had gone, do you remember that?” Max asked.

Marilyn bit her lip and pulled down the map of Siam. “I remember this map, I been thinking about it and it keeps haunting me. I know it’s Thailand but I keep thinking of it as Siam.”

Max pulled the other maps shut so it was the only one in the room. Marilyn had curled up in the other leather chair next to Rowley and he was licking her hand because he felt she was little a nervous and it helped her.

“I want you to imagine that you are a vessel slowly being filled with beautiful clear fluid. This fluid relaxes everything in you. Imagine it in your toes, and then flowing up your calves, into your pelvic area, it feels so good, now it’s in your chest, now at your throat and up to the top of your head,” Max said, slowing down his breathing, “You can breathe easier and every cell in your body is full of this beautiful clear liquid. This is a good place to talk, a safe place, and I am only interested in helping you to understand yourself in a deeper way and to connect more fully with the Divine in yourself. Let’s breathe now ten times nice and slow.”

They did and soon Max’s voice had taken on the rain-coming-down quality and even the watchful Rowley rested his head onto his chest. Marilyn felt the day fall away from her as the Map Room began to swim and she was falling, falling, falling into another state that might have been sleep but now her slippers seemed useless and clumsy to her and she slipped them off. Her toes felt a cool damp stone beneath them and when she looked up she could see a pathway lined with torches. She was leaning out a stone doorway looking down the path watching for someone, a crimson robe floated above her toes, no, not her toes, the woman Marilyn wasn’t this body.
The name came into the mind-state of Khandar, the novice monk, he was looking out the temple with his heart in his mouth. Golden statues of seated Buddhas were placed along the path, it was a place of beauty and serenity but it didn’t feel serene, it felt disturbed and threatened. The Buddhas’ eyes were calm but it was dhalamasara.

Marilyn’s face had slipped into a pose of intense concentration even though her eyes were closed. “Have you ever lived anywhere else before?” Max asked.

Marilyn said after a long moment, “The soul has many homes.”
He was a monk. True, a novice, Khandar reminded himself, but trained to be mindful, as he strained to see a form moving up the path. The man in the map room didn’t know what was out there.

Max inhaled a little sharply then but kept his voice low and easy. He needed to keep his scholarly distance, he reminded himself. She could be making it up in an effort to please him for all he knew. It didn’t feel like that, but it was entirely possible. Max walked up to the outdated brown and crimson map of the Kingdom of Siam. “Here for instance?”