The Life of Hope (15 page)

Abigal Skinner realized with a start that her thinking was addled, and quickly she looked elsewhere in the newsprint for distraction. This passage caught her eye, mostly because a printer’s devil had blemished it, covering the lines with a mark that looked for all the world like a cross. Abigal managed to read:

Abigal’s first thought was that her husband had written this, because it was what Abram was always saying, or at least it was what Abram was always trying to say. Abram, though, would become tongue-tied, and he’d rub his temples and look at the world gloomily and remain silent. Abigal searched for a name at the bottom of the column and she found: “J. B. Hope.”

The next Sunday she and Abram went to the Free Church.
During the service Abram nodded at practically everything Joseph Hope said, and he dug his elbow into Abigal’s side constantly, excited with discovery. Abigal herself was frightened by Hope—at one point Joseph pointed at her, fixed her with his tiny hawklike eye, and Abigal’s heart literally skipped a beat. As she watched Hope, Abigal discovered that her bowels were burning, that she might at any time faint. If she’d had any true choice in the matter, Abigal Skinner would have walked away right then and there—but, being a dutiful and loving wife, she did not. Abram and Abigal Skinner became Perfectionists.

Abigal Skinner did find one thing about the Free Church comforting, that—the freakish Quinton twins notwithstanding—the congregation was comprised of rather attractive people, most of them their own age. Abram and Abigal had no real friends, isolated as they were on the farm, and Abigal thought it would be nice to make the acquaintance of some of the other Perfectionists. Abigal and Cairine McDiarmid were on speaking terms immediately, and Abram soon found a companion (at least someone he could talk with, which he did every week after Hope’s service) in Adam De-la-Noy. This pleased Abigal immensely.

One of the things that gave the Perfectionist Free Church some prominence was the attendance of Adam De-la-Noy, for he was one of the most celebrated young actors in Boston, or, for that matter, in the United States. Most of his success was based upon his looks; Adam was a stunningly beautiful young man. He was tall, an inch above six feet, and his body was broad-shouldered and thin-hipped. Adam had blond hair, wavy in a very disciplined manner, and blue eyes, a light blue like a robin’s egg. These stood out in sharp contrast to his general complexion, which was so deep and mellow a brown that Bostonians suspected either that it was stage make-up or that there was the proverbial nigger in the De-la-Noy woodpile.

Adam’s one physical imperfection was that his ears were too big and stood at right angles to his head. Adam was quite often able to hide his ears upon the stage, either with a wig or hat, but sometimes a role called for him to be bare-headed and his entrance would be greeted with a quiet round of snickers. He
had, early in his career, played Hamlet, and for most of the play his Prince had gone about wearing a foppish hat that Adam thought looked vaguely Danish. When it came time for the famous soliloquy, De-la-Noy pulled off the hat reflectively. “To be or not to be,” he began, at which point someone in the front row burst out with a loud farting sound and succumbed to laughter. It wasn’t that Adam’s ears were ridiculous, that they detracted that much from his overwhelming handsomeness, it was just that they made it difficult for people to take him seriously.

And so Adam had been forced to make his living playing in melodramas. He was always the heroic romantic lead, and the audience loved him, even when they could see his ears. Adam’s great success came when he portrayed the swashbuckling Morgan le Francis in a play entitled
The Beauty and the Buccaneer
. This role was perfect for De-la-Noy, allowing him to display all of his acrobatic prowess, leaping nimbly about the stage and engaging in thrilling sword duels, and although the emotional range was rather limited, when Adam/Morgan (mistakenly) assumed that the Beauty had been tortured to death, his rendition of the line “Oh, the torture I feel now, even hers could not compare with” left not a dry eye in the house. More importantly, Adam discovered the perfect remedy for the problem of his ears—he tied them down with a red polka-dotted bandana. Adam De-la-Noy knew that no true buccaneer would ever do such a thing —it would be somewhat akin, in our day and age, to a Marine choosing to wear high heels. Still, the audience accepted it without question, and in time it became a stock part of stage piracy, even extending into the twentieth century, when Errol Flynn took a red polka-dotted bandana and tied it around his head in
Captain Blood
.

Adam De-la-Noy was not the only reason
The Beauty and the Buccaneer
was such a huge success. The Beauty was played by one Mary Carter and although, as several critics noted, the role consisted mostly of exaggerated pitchings of the bosom, no one could pitch a bosom like Mary. Quite often Mary came close to actually pitching her bosom out of her costume. The most famous scene in the play was the so-called “Torture Scene,” wherein the Beauty is tied across a rum barrel and given a
lashing with the cat-o’-nine-tails. The cutthroats who did this rudely tore the dress off her back, and through some clever bit of stage business the flesh soon became cross-hatched with cruel red welts. Throughout the scene, Mary Carter’s bosom pitching was astounding, elevated to a fine art. The “Torture Scene,” the last before intermission, always brought the crowd to their feet.

The other reason that
The Beauty and the Buccaneer
did so well was that its two stars, Adam De-la-Noy and Mary Carter, married two weeks after it opened. Since then they had always acted together, either reviving
The Beauty and the Buccaneer
or doing some variation of it. Adam was always a bandanaed pirate, Mary was always tortured, and there was always much sword play and bosom pitching.

This made them very rich and famous, although for many years Adam considered himself spiritually impoverished. This changed when he attended the Free Church, which he did on a whim. Adam was impressed with Hope, thought he made good sense. Mary was the more passionate convert of the couple, and in her declaration of Perfection she gave the assembled an impromptu demonstration of bosom pitching.

Joseph Benton Hope was very pleased.

“Listen!” Sara cocked her head sideways toward the night. “Listen.”

I was lying on the bed, wanting to go to sleep, half reading some magazine. I turned it over and listened. The world seemed
quiet enough. In time, though, I realized that the northern wind carried with it the sound of a freight train. “Choo-choo,” said I.

“Of course it’s a train, pea-brain,” said Sara (I found that many of her statements contained these internal rhymes), “but listen, it’s playing a sixth chord.” Sara stuck a finger into the air like a grade two music teacher. “Bum-bum-bum-baaaa!” Sara sang along with the train’s distant whistle. “Sixth chord,” chimed Sara. “All aboard the sixth chord!”

Sara was puttering around the bedroom, had been for about an hour. Sara was apparently a post-coital putterer. She went through my books, six or seven ragged paperbacks that I’d tossed into my suitcase as I was leaving Toronto. Sara read the titles aloud, and I grunted. “What do we have here?” Sara demanded. “A copy of
King Lear!
”

I grunted. I was tired and weary, and grunting seemed as good a response as any, a lot better than the ones I felt like giving. “Ugh.”

“Don’t this beat all?
Legends of the Fall!
”

“Ugh-ugh.”

“Here’s a story!
The Power and the Glory!
”

“Ugh.”

“What a cornucopia! A book called
Failed Utopias!
”

“Ugh?”

“
Failed Utopias: A Study of the Utopian Impulse in Four North American Communities
.”

“That one’s not mine.”

Sara carried the book over to the bed. It was an immense, leatherbound volume, the spine ornately gold-leafed with the whole of the scholarly title. Sara kicked out her legs and landed on the bed bouncing. Sara was still naked, so I began to maul her. Sara opened the tome and read further from the title page. “ ‘An Inquiry Into the Settlements at Oneida, Powf-keep-sie, Balforton and’ ”

“Poe-kip-see,” I suggested.

“ ‘Hope.’ ”

“Come again?”

“ ‘Oneida, Poe-kip-see, Balforton and Hope.’ ”

“Lemme see that.”

“I’m cold!” Sara announced suddenly. She grabbed one of
her breasts and examined it closely. “
Les bumps de goose
,” she diagnosed. “
Regardez!
” Sara pointed at the puckered nipple. “Fucking thing’s about to disappear!” Sara stood up and presented her backside to my face. “Goose-bumples, right?”

“Right.”

“It won’t do, it won’t do,” muttered Sara. “I need clothes, dammit! Vestments! Garb!” The acid had taken over in a silly but determined way. Sara began to stalk. She stared at a pile of my dirty laundry for a long time and then shook her head decisively. “I need women’s clothes,” she said, “for I have a need to be feminine.” Sara marched over to a far corner and exclaimed, “Here we are!”

There was an ancient cedar chest there. I’d never really noticed it, mostly because it was buried beneath a mountain of folded blankets, towels and washcloths. Sara threw all that stuff over to one side and pulled at the top of the chest. Nothing happened.

“Lockèd,” Sara announced.

“Probably nothing in it,” I said, picking up the large book and glancing through for references to Hope.

“There are lots in it,” Sara said. She folded her arms across her breasts, both to warm them up and to facilitate thought. “What am I to do?” Sara wondered aloud. Then, with a giggle, she reached up to her dark hair and removed a bobby pin. “Master criminal at work!” Sara hunkered down and began to pick the lock with the bobby pin. Just as I was about to mutter, “Give it up,” I heard a loud clunking sound. Sara lifted the top of the antique cedar chest. “Hey, Joe,” she muttered, “what do you know?”

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“Well …” Sara bent over and pulled out a dress, a white one, lacy and ladylike. “What did I tell you?”

“Huh!”

“Close your eyes, I’m going to put it on.”

“What, close my eyes,” I mumbled.

“Close them! It’s not right to watch a lady dressing!”

I obediently closed my eyes—if I fell asleep, it would be her fault. Just as I was about to drift away, Sara began to laugh hysterically.

I opened my eyes, and I began to laugh, too.

The dress was too big. The only way to do justice to how overly sized the dress was is to state it that simply—“too big.” Sara’s knuckles ended up near the elbow of the sleeve, and the excess dress around her feet reached a length of a dozen inches. The neckhole of the garment was so large that it barely sat on the edges of Sara’s shoulders, and the neckline swooped well underneath Sara’s breasts. The most outlandish of the dress’s measurements was shoulder to shoulder, which seemed to be in excess of three feet.

All Sara had to do was give a little shrug and she was no longer technically “wearing” the dress, although the dress still surrounded her and likely offered some warmth. She wrapped it around herself loosely and sat down, turning once more to the ancient cedar chest.

Sara then pulled out two more articles of clothing, masculine apparel this time, a pair of cloth trousers and a workshirt. Having seen the dress, we were prepared for how hilariously outsized these would be, and Sara and I again fell into fits of laughter. Sara stepped out of the mountain of lady’s dress and put on the workshirt. The tails dangled almost to the ground. After endlessly turning up the sleeves Sara managed to clear her wrists. “There we go,” announced Sara. She looked down at her body’s new covering. “Hey,” she said, “this thing’s got rust or something all over it.”

The shirt was basically gray, unfinished material, but much of it was spotted brown. Sara picked at one of these brown parts and found that it came away in her hand, leaving a hole in the fabric. “Hmm!” piped Sara. “Wonder what it is?”

Sara was talking to a boy who’d read more mysteries than was good for him. I knew what turned rust-brown with age, but I wasn’t about to tell her. “Probably just oxidization,” I lied. “That shirt looks like it’s about a hundred years old.”

“How’s about that?” Sara was as awestruck as a three-year-old. She turned back to the cedar chest. “Newspapers,” she told me, and she pulled out a small yellow thing about a foot square. “Not really a
newspaper
, Sara judged, pointing at the spine where the pages were tied and glued. “But it’s not a book, really. It’s a …”

“It’s an old magazine,” I told her.

Sara read the title page. “
The Theocratic Watchman
. What does ‘theocratic’ mean?”

“Search me. It probably has something to do with religion. God, see. Theo.”

“God’s name is Theo?” Sara joked. She crossed her legs beneath her and began to look through the contents. “Whoa!” she exclaimed. “This was published in 1859.” Sara turned some pages—the outer ones came away in her hand, a few crumpling into nothingness, but as she got further they were more substantial. Sara began to read.

Whatever Sara read was engrossing. She read in silence for some minutes, until I asked, “What’s it about?”

“Fucking,” Sara summarized. “Fucking without getting into it. You ought to read it when I’m through.”

Without stopping to wonder what she’d meant by that crack, I said, “Come off it. Your basic hundred and twenty-odd year old spiritual periodical doesn’t often talk about fucking.”

“Without getting into it.”