The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (22 page)

The larger part of the house turned out to be sparsely furnished and unused. Justine had moved her bed, a large four-poster
of course, into what had been the library-study and camped out there, among the remaining treasured possessions of her great-grandmother.
Certain touches caught my eye immediately, relating to descriptions I’d read of Seabrook’s quarters in New York: a faded cashmere
shawl on one wall; a Chinese lamp above the antique roll-top desk in the corner; a long Adam mirror.

My eyes swung back to a print framed above the desk, and I went over to study it with mild disbelief. Reclining, along the
length of a stone bridge with multiple arches, lay the figure of a naked girl. She reached an arm above and behind her to
grasp the roof of a tower on the bridge’s superstructure. Serenely dozing, the peaceful giantess’s long tresses descended
beneath the surface of a river below. Justine shared in my admiration of the old drawing.

“I love old bridges so.” She glanced at me and giggled. “Yes, dearest, even the ones in ‘Madison County.’ I’m afraid I’m like
JJ that way!” She looked back at the reproduction. “I was charmed by that when I saw it in school, but I hadn’t remembered
whose work it was.” She pointed to the signature,
Man Ray, 1917.
“Behold my surprise when I found it here.”

Behold mine,
I thought, the gooseflesh rising on my skin. On the edge of having to confront the reality of this part of her heritage,
as well as the stunning revelations of the morning, I said, “Its name is
The Bridge at Avignon.
” I almost whispered, as if something might overhear. My generation had been into Man Ray and the surrealists, but Justine,
the “Gen-Xer,” had not recognized him, nor known the history. If this anomalous thing were as real as it was beginning to
seem, I had to quit playing games and tell her about the “composite” Justine’s vision of the street circus. In the face of
what was happening, her ancestress’s alleged psychic ability might likely be more than an incidental factor.

The study furnishings, plus Justine’s bed and some Persian rugs, made the room cozy, almost overstuffed in comparison to the
rest of the virtually empty house. Along with a kitchen and bath down the hall, this was all that she’d needed. She’d been
spending her recent days and hours reading her great-grandmother’s papers and books, with which the shelves along two walls
were still amply supplied. After we had brought in our things, she took my hand and led me to a staircase to the upper rooms.

“I’m afraid it looks like your estate was pretty well pilfered,” I remarked, and she nodded silently, turning on a light in
the second-story hall that was as yellowed as the wallpaper. I paused to look at some large prints that still hung on the
walls. Two were of street scenes, one of a boulevard in Paris, the other appearing to be early-century New York in winter.

I laughed at some others, “Babe, these pictures look like those
swamps
we were driving over last night!” She just motioned me toward a narrow stair that I calculated led to the turret room. We
stopped for her to unlock a heavy door that would have been a formidable obstacle in any era. The blue twilight from without
called me back to the darkened upper hall of my boyhood home. Had its whispering shadows followed behind me?

I guessed that Justine might be feeling a similar spookiness as she took my hand, this time very like the little girl afraid
of the dark, drawing me into the dimly lit room. There were windows on half of the octagon, the remaining sections abutting
the roof. Each window had its little light, silhouetting a New England rocker that sat facing them. The dim illumination had
already revealed to me that something much like the fabled mural was truly there, covering two sections of the wall.

It was evident that all this room had ever been for was to simply sit and watch the painting and the windows with their little
lamps. There was the ghostly feeling that the old chair might, ever so slightly, begin to rock. Might I walk around it to
find the ancient Justine sitting there still? I reached to lift its tidy with incredulous anticipation, when Justine turned
on an old-fashioned pole lamp to disclose the faded, checkered upholstery beneath. Ward Greene had described just such a piece
of furniture, belonging to his character “Justine,” sometime before 1930. Was that the moment when I recognized the living
legacy of an actual human being? Oh yes. All doubt was extinguished that the original Justine, by whatever name she had been
known, had been a discrete entity, a living woman of flesh and blood, not a composite or a fiction.

I stepped over to examine the loving mural with its prayer by John Donne. By this point, I knew its little characters and
vignettes as I knew the figures and episodes from my life which had been haunting my dreams more often of late. This was again
like visiting another man’s dreamscape, and I felt the same hushed reverence that Justine was demonstrating. More, viewing
its magnificent reality confirmed Marjorie’s disclaimer, that it had not been painted with a promotion in mind, that she’d
never intended for it to endure public display.

————————

T
HE WHOLE PAINTING WAS A PRAYER,
not Donne’s lines alone—a heartfelt prayer for the immortal soul of its subject. Curious though it remained that a woman
of Marjorie’s sensibilities had been attracted to Willie Seabrook to begin with, the touching sincerity of her work of art,
that she had believed lost, was undeniable. I was humbled and shamed by remembrance of my worldly scorn at its creator, as
well as for having doubted its caretaker.

It was with a feeling akin to fear that my fingertips lightly brushed the figure of a tiny nude spread-eagled on a doorway,
face locked within a helmet of red leather. I could imagine that, rather than the expected texture of paint and wood, my touch
might somehow intrude upon the trembling, sweating flesh of the masked icon within whose home I now stood. I was moved to
verify what I could see of the figure’s naked chest. Whoever’s features the mask concealed, they were not those of Leah Hirsig.
Upon her breast there was no Star.

I turned quietly to see Justine kneeling by an old cedar chest under the windows, gently removing its contents. A pretty party
dress from the flapper era, a couple of beautiful little beaded handbags, a box of cigarettes of a vanished brand, bundles
of letters tied with faded ribbons, and other keepsakes. The precious memories of a lifetime were stored in that chest.

She then began laying out items of the same barbaric silver as the jewelry she’d worn in the Marriott bar. One pair of bracelets
was in reality manacles—with locking clasps and rings attached. When she spread out the belt, with its uncut stones and little
chains, my last skepticism dissolved. By description and illustration, it could be none other than the
Yezidi
marriage belt acquired during Seabrook’s Arabian adventure.

Justine handed me an African mask, one that he might have received from the very hands of Wamba, she of the Fan-Shaped Destiny.
Justine stayed on her knees, hands between her thighs and looking expectantly at me, as for approval. Seeking to lighten things
up, I smiled, and said, “Thank you for looking after all this. Uncle Willie would be proud.” For a moment she seemed oddly
surprised, then giggled with delight.

We gathered up the Seabrook articles by unspoken consent, Justine carefully replacing her predecessor’s other treasures in
the chest, and took the memorabilia back down to her living area. She then spoke of how the estate had been picked over, in
spite of its owner’s careful planning. I agreed it significant that most items explicitly named in the will had not been taken.
In this situation, the theft was likely connected to someone who had been with the law firm, or an earlier executor. A quarter
century having elapsed, something of this nature was to have been expected.

In the study, she pointed out how there were no first editions of anything left on the shelves. The only works of Seabrook
that remained were
Asylum
and
White Monk,
neither of which could have given her a complete picture of the man or his work. There were, however, many old books. She
watched me as I browsed their titles.

I knew my growing astonishment must have shown, for there were Charles Hinton and J.W. Dunne, books about Einstein and Minkowski,
the Michelson-Morley experiment, the third volume of the Feynman lectures—all the classics that I had read in pursuit of my
own quest. There were philosophical works on the ancient idea of the plurality of worlds, and more recent science magazines.
I examined an old copy of
Physics Today
lying above the roll-top.

“Justine,” I gasped, “do you know what this is, the edition for September of 1970?”

“It was inside the top of her desk, and that was the month she wrote her will. As if she’d been reading it at that time?”

“This contains the first popularization of Everett’s theory by Bryce DeWitt,” I told her. I shook my head as the old copy
still readily fell open to the well-thumbed pages of the DeWitt article, its paradoxes illustrated by little drawings of the
predicament of Schrödinger’s kitty-cat.

The hard science ended, naturally, with the classics. Priestley was there, alongside Lawrence Durrell and other time-haunted
writers of literature. There was Michelet in French, and other French sources that Seabrook might have perused in the library
at Geneva. Also in French were Paul Morand, Anaïs Nin, and Pauline Réage.

There were Aldous Huxley and Gertrude Stein, Hecht, Van Vechten, and others dear to the heart of a Lost Generation New Yorker.
I was given pause by a little book on puppets by one Tony Sarg. More when I touched the spine of Thomas Wolfe’s
Of Time and the River,
written just down the road from Seabrook’s residence at Rhinebeck.

Thunder rumbled outside, startling me back from… somewhere. It seemed the storm had caught up to us. There before me were
Eleanora Deren’s
Divine Horsemen,
and a number of other books on Voudon in Haiti and America, as well as its African origins. I pulled down
The White King of La Gonave,
and pointed out to Justine its introduction by Seabrook, which she hadn’t yet noticed. So many things of my own obsessions—why,
I’d just found de Sade, then Borges. Might Borges, who was close to the poet Valéry, have not also known his friend Paul Morand?
Maybe he had been influenced by Seabrook more directly than by merely reading things everyone else had forgotten…

The wind rattled old shutters. “It’s time,” Justine expressed in her same hushed tone, as if something momentous was at hand.
As, oh God, it surely was. She unlocked the roll-top and turned on the Chinese lamp, motioning me to sit at the desk, and
placed in front of me a document. It was a long letter on some twenty sheets of yellowed bond paper, their age implicit in
the typewriting of an Underwood Standard. I discovered the old typewriter still in its desk well; maybe untouched since that
other Justine had last replaced it all those years before.

Justine merely told me that the letter had been attached to the will, then moved away to let me read. She cleared off a large
table in the middle of the room. I glanced at her with sexy thoughts, once or twice at most, absorbed in her project of carefully
arranging the memorabilia on the table. Thus had Seabrook displayed his trophies in the barn studio—he
would
have been proud. Perhaps a spirit could rest a bit easier.

The rain had begun again, high up on the tin roof and reverberating through the empty house. I remembered my trip through
the South years before with Linda, thinking how every night seemed to be a rainy night in Georgia. But there, in Justine’s
library-bedroom, all was warm and cozy, and I began to read. Even when I would later read Willie’s lost manuscript and wonder
at its incredible message, even that would not have the devastatingly personal impact of this first introduction to his true
mystery.

I was soon engrossed. There was additional information, clarification, and provocatively leading hints that I’d sought in
vain through the resources I had available. Lighting my pipe, I was drawn into the love and pain of that other Justine, first
as she’d laboriously typed her final defiance of time and death. Then, perhaps because I’d read so much of them and their
world, back to early century New York, to Toulon and Avignon, and Rhinebeck. Even now, a maelstrom of emotion renders it indescribable
for me. I simply include, in its entirety:

THE TESTAMENT OF MADELEINE LEIRIS

September 20, 1970

My Dearest Justine,

Having not much longer in this life, I address this personal communication to my great-granddaughter. By the time you are
reading this, you have become heir to the lion’s share of the properties enumerated in my legal will, to which this document
is attached. Doubtless, my act of leaving a substantial bequest to a person not as yet conceived, as of this writing, will
be viewed as but another whimsy of an eccentric old woman.

I have the assurance of my attorney that it will stand as long as proper legal niceties are observed, to wit, securing of
a pittance to other potential claimants and, my soundness of mind not be held in question. To the first issue, I have selected
a firm that is old and highly respected in Atlanta, positively stodgy, with whose founding family I have maintained very close
association. Other agents are prepared to ensure the process should there be any breach in my charted path, so I have complete
confidence that all will go as intended.

As our countrymen are scandalous among the great powers for their remarkable narrowness, I am constrained to circumspection
regarding certain matters. At the same time, I must needs supply adequate direction that you may receive your true bequest
with all deliberate haste. Some women of our bloodline have been known for particular forms of intuition and for uncommon
recall. Therefore, I advise you to search your recollections for memories that may serve you in the search I know you will
now undertake.