The Uses of Enchantment (34 page)

As she approached the town limits of Chadwick, her mood began to shift, from vaguely anxious to self-castigating and hopeless. It was late. For all she knew Dr. Hammer had a wife now, he had young children who had been in bed for hours and whose early waking curtailed his evenings, making it impossible for him to reach ten o’clock in the evening without nodding off over his book or TV program.

But even assuming Dr. Hammer
was
still awake at 10:55 p.m., what guarantee did she have that he would talk to her? She struggled to remember the last time she’d seen Dr. Hammer but couldn’t recall the specifics or even the nonspecifics because the meeting, whenever it had been, had failed to preannounce itself as final. Logic told her that the meeting took place on Beacon Street at Dr. Hammer’s publishing house, located in a three-story brick house with a functioning dumbwaiter that the secretary used to move files and sandwiches between floors. After she’d terminated her treatment she’d met Dr. Hammer only three or so times, and always in the company of her father and the editorial assistant, to go over the
Miriam
manuscript. Hard facts were unthinkingly changed—her name, the street on which she lived—while more slippery ones had to be verified and reverified, as the editorial assistant flipped through the page proofs with his pencil, erasing marks next to the fact-checker’s queries. It was a confusing business; she was asked to swear as accurate, for example, her statements that Dr. Hammer claimed to be untrue.
Yes
, she’d agreed.
It is true that that is a lie. Everything is correctly false
.

But maybe there’d been something more celebratory to mark their final meeting, a lunch she’d forgotten, at which he’d handed her the finished book and written his inscription (
For “Miriam”
). Or had the book quietly arrived by mail, already inscribed? She didn’t remember. The book was so long lost that its arrival, too, had been obscured.

But what most needled her at the moment was this recent meeting (she presumed there had been a meeting) between her mother and Dr. Hammer. Roz had sent her mother to Dr. Hammer armed with the same address—wasn’t this the thing “of interest” she’d used to tempt her mother into her office? Still, the many unknowns nagged her. Her mother, after all, had never technically met Dr. Hammer. Of course she’d
met
the man, but not so far as he knew. Had she appeared to him, these many years later, still pretending to be her own sister? Or had she appeared as herself?
Of course
, he would respond.
Of course you weren’t who you said you were
. He would invite her into his house, where there would or would not be a wife, children, etc. And they would talk about…what?
The material. Some relationships are more predisposed to succeed due to a familiarity with the material
. Years after the fact, Mum and Dr. Hammer had sat in matching armchairs flanking a table with cups of tea or maybe, depending on Dr. Hammer’s extracurricular vices, a glass of scotch, white wine, some gummy half-congealed coffee liqueur he’d been dragging around since graduate school. They had stayed up all night and, because her mother’s self was prone to wander, she had discovered, as Mary had discovered, her natural ability to be Dr. Hammer’s most perfect patient. She had confirmed all the self-fortifying suspicions that kept him awake at night.
Yes
, her daughter had lied to him—and then lied about lying.
No
, he had not been a bad doctor, a devastatingly wrong judge of character, a plain old sucker. He had been betrayed by a young girl who, they both chose to agree from this more charitable distance, was more to be pitied than blamed. She craved attention; once one avenue had been exhausted she’d done a U-turn and, with Roz’s help, reinvigorated interest in her case. And then—nothing. She had faded into obscurity, she had moved to the Northwest, she had failed to yield. Hyper radiant that she was, she had burned herself out before she was even twenty.

A gristly possibility, Mary thought. A years-later postmortem that effectively rendered her unnecessary. No wonder her mother had refused to see her; the closure her mother had required was attained without any help from her. Mary
was
Miriam, the hyper radiant, her mother might have concluded; she’d inhabited her imagination’s crafty geography as a way to refute the confused call of adolescent sexuality, which meant she was neither a liar nor a slut; she was an
artist
. Roz’s investigation, the inquiry by the Massachussetts Mental Health Governing Board, the court case—none of this discounted what her mother and Dr. Hammer resurrected as the real story. Together they assured themselves: Mary’s abduction was, as Dr. Hammer originally claimed it was, all in Mary’s head. Together they’d agreed to forgive her. Closure all around. The end.

So easy.

Mary pinballed recklessly through three rotaries, she ignored the
CAUTION
signs that admonished her to reduce her speed now that she was approaching the Village of Chadwick. Main Street quickly corroded into increasingly crimped and hobbit-size storefronts before lapsing into wall- and hedge-lined blackness. Here Water Street picked up the thread as an unlit and unassuming artery wiggling off the main drag, its erratic zigzags approximating the shape of the invisible coast. As with most Water Streets, no water was visible from the street.

Mary peered at the walls for house numbers as she drove, slowly now, her desire not to overshoot her mark deflating her sense of recklessness. A stone wall gave way to a newish brick wall, then a hedge, then another stone wall. Dr. Hammer’s number—48—was plainly visible on a generic black metal mailbox that emerged from the ground at a thirty degree angle, victim of repeated batterings by the winter plow. His driveway slid through a narrow gap in the brick.

The problem with rich people
, Mary thought,
is that they’re impossible to stun
. She stopped in the middle of the street, not wanting to turn into Dr. Hammer’s driveway. Her headlights would pique him, give him crucial seconds to wonder
what the hell
as she parked her car, walked to the door, rang the bell, predispose him to categorize her visit as an unwelcome surprise. Nor was there any shoulder on Water Street where she could leave her car. So her only choice, as she saw it, was the least noble one: turn off her headlights and drive up to the house in the dark.

Mary extinguished her headlights and instantly the space in the brick into which she was turning extinguished as well. But she had already begun her turn and so, trusting that she’d aimed properly, she confidently drove Aunt Helen’s station wagon into what she abstractly experienced as a hardened piece of night.

Her skull hurled toward the windshield, spared a concussion by the just-in-time retraction of her seat belt. Outside, a mini avalanche of brick bits and mortar ricocheted off the station wagon’s hood. Mary remained in the driver’s seat, stunned to near fury by her stupidity. She opened her door and stepped into the dark, instantly tripping over a long, pipe-like something—her axle?—and pitching clumsily forward onto her hands and knees. From this humbled position, she surveyed the damage. The front of Aunt Helen’s car was so badly crushed it appeared to have been swallowed by the brick wall. The mailbox and its now broken post, over which she’d tripped, had caught in the car’s undercarriage; it now protruded at a perpendicular angle from behind the front wheels. Attached to the mailbox—by a severed chain—was a carved wood sign, the gilded cursive wriggingly alive in the glow cast from the car’s interior light:
WANDERSLORE
.

She looked toward Dr. Hammer’s house, tensed against the explosion of dog barks or the sudden blazing of porch lights—but nothing. No one had heard the sound of Aunt Helen’s car striking their brick wall, or they’d heard it and attributed the noise to a more likely source, like the salt truck hitting a pothole.

Her earlier desire to speak with Dr. Hammer was replaced by an overwhelming impulse to flee the scene. Better to simply disappear and allow the situation to resolve itself, however inaccurately; she could approach him again in a few days, maybe even a week, and she would either confess to running into his wall or she would not. The station wagon she could return to the spot in front of her house from which she’d removed it. She could allow Aunt Helen to believe that she’d drunkenly hit a parked car on her way to see her nieces. Aunt Helen, once properly saturated, forgot the majority of her pre-drunk day. She would view the crushed front half of her car, she would quietly slip the key into her ignition and drive home, operating on the theory that the fewer people who knew about her accident, the less chance of being caught, the less chance of her insurance premiums skyrocketing, the less chance that the world would have to publicly acknowledge that she was a drunk. What dismayed Mary, as she played out this scenario in her head, was how stupidly easy it was to be dishonest. People needed to be more vigilant. People needed to be more paranoid. People needed to realize that the least probable explanation was the most probable explanation.
My niece stole my car to drive to see her former therapist, she ran into a brick wall trying to take him by surprise, and then she tried to gaslight me
. But if Aunt Helen weren’t such a shirker then Mary wouldn’t be able to be a shirker either. Dishonesties bred dishonesties. Lies encouraged tiny epidemics. She should know.

As she indulged her theoretical regret over the ease with which she could, once again, disappear, she realized that, in fact, there was no escaping this situation. As her eyes adjusted better to the poorly lit gloom she registered that the station wagon’s bumper had in fact wedged itself
into
the brick wall; so many bricks had been knocked out by the impact that the wall dipped and swelled above the car’s hood. It didn’t take a structural engineer to deduce that Aunt Helen’s station wagon was the only thing standing between the wall’s tenuous existence and its partial collapse.

Mary brushed the crushed stones from her pants and hands and started down the driveway. The house too was brick, set on a diagonal to the drive. The upstairs windows remained dark, the downstairs windows as well, but she could see large rectangles of light spreading across the backyard. So he was awake, she thought, unsure if this improved her situation or worsened it.

Mary
, she would say when he answered the door.
It’s Mary Veal here.

She climbed the steps expecting a sensored porch light to announce her approach, but she proved to be as invisible here as she was in West Salem. And so it was in relative darkness that she reached for the bell. It was in relative darkness that he answered the door seconds after the pad of her finger touched the protruding bronze button, almost as if he’d known she’d be standing at his threshold.

His hair was still too long for a lawyer’s hair, even an ex-lawyer’s hair, curling upward where it struck his collar.

She stared at the man, stunned.

Hello, Scheherazade, the man said. I’ve been expecting you.

Notes

APRIL 8, 1986

T
he morning following my most recent session with Mary, I awoke in a confident mood. I awoke confident that my hyper radiance theory was both relevant in this particular case and likely of greater psychological consequence. I awoke confident that, like Roz, I could secure a patron to fund my research and assist my publishing aspirations. So it was serendipity, coincidence, or my own fate-altering sense of deserved good fortune that prompted Roz to accept a last-minute invitation extended by a local live radio show producer to discuss her new book,
Trampled Ivy
. She was thus unable to attend a fund-raiser for the Dibble Library in West Salem with her patron and editor, Craig Hoppin, that evening. I was perhaps too eager to attend in her place.

I had met Hoppin, a newspaper heir in his late sixties with a Tourettic capacity for rapid-fire rudeness, upward of seven times. That he’d never remembered me didn’t lessen my enthusiasm to accompany him to the fund-raiser. I waited by the name-tags table for ten minutes until Hoppin, a compact bulldog of a man, arrived in his usual tweed suit and bow tie. There hadn’t been time to call ahead for a replacement name tag; I extended a hand and introduced myself jokily as Roz. I offered to get him a drink from the bar. Fifteen minutes later I relocated him with Mary’s Aunt Helen, the two of them stationed before a portrait of a young girl leaning on a single crutch. Helen noticed my approach and whispered to Hoppin. He nodded, two fingers pittering along the noseguard of his wire rims.

Do you two know each other? Helen said loudly. As is typical behavior for a patient suffering from a confused intimacy disorder, Helen’s facial expression discouraged me from advancing even while she beckoned me toward her with her hand.

Roz Biedelman, I reminded Hoppin, handing him his watery drink.

Hoppin glared at his drink.

I don’t know about you, said Hoppin, but I am eroticized by sadness.

I can get you another, I offered.

We’re talking about how this space exudes a palpable, and almost
sexual
, despair, explained Helen. Did you know that Mrs. Dibble’s daughter—Helen pointed to a portrait they’d been examining—hung herself from the chandelier?

Her eyes gestured overhead toward a cast-iron light fixture, its sharp extremities punctuated with flame-shaped bulbs.

How tragic, I said.

The foreshadowing of the musket, said Hoppin, dipping his eyes toward what I’d interpreted, tellingly, as a crutch. It’s delicious.

Helen smiled, apparently thrilled to share the experience with a recent convert to ghoulishness.

How does Mrs. Dibble feel about your treating her family tragedy as cocktail party chitchat? I chided Helen, trying to mimic her hostile-flirtatious tone and sounding instead like a drab scold.