The Uses of Enchantment Page 6

  Returning to the foyer, Mary checked the to-do list on the credenza. Second on the list, beneath “M’s Closet,” was “M’s Desk.” An arrow traversed the paper and pointed to three keys on a ring with a masking-tape tag (KEYS TO DESK) resting on the credenza.

  Looking at the keys, her immediate conviction was that she would find Miriam in one of her mother’s desk drawers. Now, she realized, she just wanted to find the book, regardless of whether or not her mother meant her to find it. Then again (her un-caffeinated brain spun fuzzily), maybe her mother meant her to find it without consciously meaning her to find it. Meaning: Mary, when she’d packed up her belongings to move to Oregon for college, had neglected to take the book as an unconscious way to communicate to her mother—though she’d be hard-pressed to designate what, exactly, she’d been trying to say. One could argue that she had abandoned the book as a signal to her mother that she did not cherish nor self-centeredly fetishize her disappearance and its aftermath; she was, in fact, deeply ashamed of it, and wished to separate herself from it by inserting the span of a continent. But in that case, why not destroy the book? One could thus argue that her leaving it behind was an unconsciously aggressive maneuver and not an innocent, if misguided, mea culpa; that she could move across the country and symbolically leave behind her past for her mother to caretake was irresponsible and immature and even a little cruel. As was the possibility that she’d left the book behind as bait. Had she? Had she left it behind to test if her mother would take it?

  Mary took the keys upstairs and unlocked the desk drawers, quickly surmising there were no books to be found, only sheets and sheets of disorganized paper. She diverted her disappointment through work, subdividing the drawer contents into five piles on the guest bed: PHOTOS, HISTORICAL SOCIETY, ABIGAIL LAKE, MISC. CORRESPONDENCE, MISC. JUNK. HISTORICAL SOCIETY became a jumble of press releases, meeting minutes, fund-raising pitches, unused letterhead. ABIGAIL LAKE included the sheaves of template responses Mum had received from governors and senators and local historians. We are sorry but at this juncture, they commenced, never ones to beat around the bush, those governors and senators and local historians. We sympathize with your situation, however. Many times Mary had found herself fascinated, but also perplexed, by Mum’s obsession with clearing the name of poor long-dead Abigail Lake. For whose sake is this energy being expended, she had often wondered. For whose sake is this forgiveness being so single-mindedly sought.

  MISC. CORRESPONDENCE was limited to European cathedral postcards from Maxie or Susan. MISC. JUNK included grocery receipts, a few dry cleaning tickets, fabric swatches and paint chips left over from the redecorating project Mum embarked upon after her daughters had left for college. PHOTOS became a repetitive pile of women in straw hats (summer) or loden coats (fall) stacked in neat unsmiling rows. Mum’s left-leaning cursive identified the back of each photo. “Annual Beekman Plaza Luncheon,” “West Salem Cemetery Restoration Committee,” “Dibble Library Fund-raiser.” After Abigail Lake, the Dibble Library was Mum’s second-most-consuming pet project. Mrs. Dibble, a polio victim and fanatical collector of witch trial memorabilia, agreed to donate her collection to the historical society so long as it remained in her actual library, a miniature version of her larger stone house right down to the octagonal turret. The library had been moved from the Dibble Estate in Hulls Cove to the grounds of the West Salem Historical Society in 1981. A giant portrait of a younger Mrs. Dibble hung in the Dibble Library foyer, her thin form flanked by a pair of coal-black Scotties, her leg braces hidden beneath a skirt. In the reading nook hung a second portrait, of a red-haired girl leaning on a decorative musket. Mum liked to tell potential donors that the Dibble daughter, at twenty, had hung herself from the library’s chandelier while her parents were vacationing in Acapulco. Whether this was true or not, Mary never learned. But her mother claimed that the average donation to the library tripled after the donor had been told, in whispered tones, about the daughter’s suicide.

  Mary broke for a cup of grief tea, then returned to tackle her mother’s filing cabinet. Bills, more letterhead, tax returns, a family tree that traced the Veal family back to Abigail Lake and very few other notables save a Nantucket whaling captain named Alonzo Veal. Alonzo Veal was the reason her mother had stipulated in her will that the family should go on a whale-watching trip on her next birthday, her sixtieth, and scatter her ashes at the first sight of a whale. Given her mother’s practical allergies against powerboats and earnest poetic gestures, this request struck Mary as more than a bit peculiar; and again, while in the esteemed mahogany chambers of Harold “Buzz” Stanworth as he read droningly through the will’s subsections, she had to remind herself how little she knew her mother anymore.

  Mary shut the top two drawers and tried to shut the bottom drawer, but the bottom drawer would not shut. She jiggled the drawer, she semi-carelessly back-and-forthed it. From the muffled thunking noises this produced, she brilliantly concluded: something had slipped behind the drawer after she’d unlocked it. She muscled the drawer out of its slot and reached into the newly revealed space.

  The object was palm-sized and made of metal, smooth save for the spidery-webbed engraving she could feel with her fingertip.

  She knew what it was without having to look at it.

  She placed the cigarette case—taped around its middle to a large manila envelope labeled decorator’s estimates—on the floor by her feet, stupidly fearful of holding it. Though the case, like the book, had disappeared years ago, she’d always assumed that she’d simply misplaced it. She’d been careless with it, leaving it on her desk, stashing it in the odd drawer; she’d wanted it to go away, and was pleased to discover one day that it had. So she was surprised, and fairly unnerved, to discover her mother had been the thief.

  Mary turned her attention to decorator’s estimates. She slid the metal prongs through the gummed hole in the fold and slipped her hand inside, withdrawing a receipt torn from a generic sales slip pad. A rubber stamp had been pressed crookedly into the top: DEN OF ANTIQUITIES, it read, and beneath that, in black ballpoint:

  engraved cigarette case $13 + .65 tax TOTAL $13.65

  Mary stared at the receipt, uncomprehending. Stranger still was this: the receipt had been written by her mother. No doubt about it, the handwriting was her mother’s.

  Which made no sense at all.

  Mary set the case and the receipt aside to examine the remaining items inside decorator’s estimates. She pulled out a typewritten document, sawdusted with yellowed white-out.

  Ida and the Arsonist, by Mary Veal

  Ms. Wilkes, Period 2 English

  10/01/85

  Ida lived on a very dull block in a very dull town during a very dull time. On the dullest of dull days, she noticed a man hiding behind a tree in the neighbor’s yard. She saw the man again hiding behind the gates of her school. One day she was late coming home. When she turned onto her street she saw that her house was on fire. The fireman told her that everyone inside the house was dead, including herself. The neighbors didn’t recognize her. She said “I’m Ida!” and they told her not to play games with the dead. Then she saw the man in the crowd, flicking a lighter. Ida ran. She ran through the cemetery and across the golf course to the highway and caught a ride north with a bearded man in a truck. They drove into the mountains. They stopped for gas. The bearded man said “Stay here,” but Ida followed him to the pay phone. She heard him say into the phone, “I’ve got her.” Ida grabbed her knapsack and escaped into the woods. Pausing for breath on a rock, she heard the sound of a lighter behind her. Snap snap snap. Soon the leaves were ablaze. Ida ran until she was too tired to run anymore. She lay down to sleep, waiting to be burned alive. She awoke wet. It had rained. Around her, the trees sizzled. The man with the lighter sat on a charred stump, smoking a cigarette.

  Ms. Wilkes, her ninth-grade English teacher, had noted in red felt pen, “Such imagination! but not really the assignment” in the margin, and given Mary a B.

  M
ary put “Ida and the Arsonist” in MISC. JUNK; it did nothing to help explain the receipt, and was embarrassing besides, a bit of self-satisfied youthfulness best relegated to the dung heap. She turned decorator’s estimates upside down. Two envelopes dropped out, each embossed with a Semmering Academy shield, one perceptibly older than the other. She withdrew the letter from the older envelope first, noting the typed name below the signature. Ms. Nadia Wilkes. Ms. Wilkes, as academy protocol dictated, had written to Mary’s mother on October 23, 1985, to inform her that Mary was currently failing fall semester English due to the following two reasons: 1) Mary refused to complete assignments properly (see as evidence Mary’s enclosed “critical response” to Freud’s Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria); 2) Mary had missed all but one of her deadlines for her fall English project, a letter-writing crusade “enacted on behalf of an unjustly accused or mistreated woman.”

  The wronged-woman project, Ms. Wilkes wrote, was Semmering Academy’s most enduring rite of academic passage. Just last year a student’s letter-writing campaign on behalf of a wrongly imprisoned babysitter had resulted in a reopening of the case. The point, Ms. Wilkes clarified, was not to make the news, the point was to “rescue” somebody with whom the student felt a deep personal connection, the idea being that the student “will discover within herself a wronged woman whom she herself has the power to exonerate.” One African American student had chosen a slave girl from Georgia and written letters to the local elementary school, urging them to start a commemorative day in the slave girl’s name; a girl whose father died before she was born wrote letters to Jason and his father, King Aeson, explaining Medea’s actions and begging for a greater cultural understanding of the pressures endured by single mothers; some students had chosen, as had Mary’s sister Regina, a family relative such as Abigail Lake, a woman accused of witchcraft and hanged.

  Mary, however, had made a mockery of the assignment. She had chosen as her wronged woman Dora, Freud’s famous patient. This was fine with Ms. Wilkes. What wasn’t fine with Ms. Wilkes was that Mary, when asked to give an oral presentation on her subject, gave her oral presentation not on Dora but on Bettina Spencer (Semmering ’74), a disturbed former student who had faked her disappearance, testified in court that she’d been abducted and sexually abused by Semmering’s then field hockey coach, and burned down the Semmering Founder’s Library. Ms. Wilkes, worried that Dora had mutated into a fraught topic for Mary, reassigned her to Charlotte Perkins Gilman. But Mary had failed to write her essay describing her personal attachment to Gilman. She had failed to submit her letter-writing campaign strategy, and the result she hoped her campaign would achieve. The project, due November 7, in two weeks’ time, constituted 75 percent of her fall term grade.

  “Unless unforeseen circumstances arise,” Ms. Wilkes concluded, “I am afraid that I will have to give Mary a failing grade for junior fall English.”

  Mary folded the letter and returned it to its envelope. She couldn’t help but mildly gloat that Ms. Wilkes had been forced, due to “unforeseen circumstances,” to give her an incomplete.

  She withdrew the second, visibly newer letter postmarked four months ago, the address written in someone’s nearly illegible hand.

  I’ve found something that might be of interest to you.

  Skuz Bod

  Mary coughed. Gently at first, then more desperately. Her throat felt carpeted in a tickly fur, impossible to dislodge no matter how many times she hacked into her hand.

  She folded the letter, she returned it to the envelope, she placed it atop MISC. JUNK. This, she thought this is no road to pursue. Her brain whirred faster. She thought: What’s done was done. She thought: Where there once were dead people there is now a future filled with our trashy past. She thought: What does the vagrant want? What does the vagrant want?

  Outside, the sleet quieted down to nothing as it thickened into snow. Outside, it was as dark as evening.

  To Mary’s knowledge her mother hadn’t seen Roz Biedelman since the one and only time the two had met, in April of 1987, some three months after the publication of Miriam. Mary recalled with visceral precision the dread she’d felt as through the window she watched Roz struggling to free her canvas tote bag from the backseat of her Volvo. Wearing an ankle-length kilim coat that lent her the hulking appearance of a Mongol raider, Roz had led the way up the Veals’ sidewalk that drizzly April morning followed by a skinny woman who wielded her umbrella like a panicky lepidopterist with her net. Dr. Flood, an obvious anorexic, was the third office member in Dr. Hammer and Roz’s brownstone suite. If Dr. Flood represented anything to Mary before this day, it was this: her anorexia had given Mary something mockable to offer her mother when she returned from her appointments with Dr. Hammer, and they had used the woman’s evident misery as a bonding opportunity during a time when the two of them were otherwise lacking in bonding opportunities. Until Mary was face-to-face with this extracurricular version of Dr. Flood, skittishly trailing Roz Biedelman up Mary’s own bricked walk, she had never seen any reason to find her behavior regrettable.

  Her mother, cheeks and neck still greasy with unabsorbed face cream, greeted Roz and Dr. Flood at the door with the high, cheerful tones she reserved for the unwanted. She took their coats and ushered them into the living room and asked if anyone wanted coffee. Dr. Flood rescinded into the crook of the couch wordlessly while Roz pulled files from her tote bag and arranged them in a semicircular flare on the carpet. Her mother returned with coffee and some slabs of week-old coffee cake, leftovers from a historical society brunch she’d hosted.

  Mary tried to catch her mother’s eye numerous times. Her mother refused to look at her.

  “So,” Mum said. Just that: so.

  Roz reflexively spooled off her CV: as she’d mentioned on the phone, she was a Harvard-trained psychologist and the author of the highly acclaimed book, Trampled Ivy. She volunteered as a mental health adviser at Semmering Academy though she had never treated Mary because Mary had never appeared to need treatment until her case was “beyond the legal purview of in-house counseling.” She, Dr. Flood, and Dr. Hammer had, until the recent publication of Dr. Hammer’s book Miriam, shared an office suite. In addition to being a colleague, she explained, Dr. Flood was also her “patient”; six months ago, Dr. Flood had joined Roz’s encounter group, Radcliffe Women Against Needless Domestic Abuse.

  “Is domestic abuse ever needful?” Mum inquired.

  “Elizabeth and I have decided that we won’t keep any secrets here,” Roz said, gesturing toward Dr. Flood. “I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable knowing about Elizabeth’s RWANDA involvement, because Elizabeth isn’t uncomfortable that you know this about her.”

  Roz looked to Dr. Flood for confirmation. Dr. Flood feigned transfixion with the fireplace.

  “As long as you’re not expecting an exchange of like confessions,” Mum said. “And by the way,” she said, turning to Mary, “you are not to say a word. Understand? Not one word to these people.”

  Mary nodded.

  “I’ve had enough of their obfuscations,” her mother said as much to herself as to anyone. “Quite enough.”

  “So much of Mary’s story has been obfuscated,” Roz said. “Which is why we feel it’s important to get everything on the table. Or on the carpet, as it were.”

  Roz gestured toward the file folders.

  “Story,” Mum parroted sarcastically.

  “That is the only word to use, I’m afraid,” Roz said. “Your daughter’s experience has been, to a highly unprofessional degree, fictionalized by Dr. Hammer.”

  From her bag she pulled a copy of Miriam and tossed it, with evident dismissiveness, onto the floor beside the file folders. She didn’t need to explain that the book proposed the following: Mary, aka “Miriam,” had faked her abduction and had successfully lied to everyone—family, friends, police, therapist, all of whom had believed her, at least until Dr. Hammer discovered the truth: Mary, he claimed, had never been abducted. She’d disapp
eared, yes, but not because someone had taken her. She had hidden herself away. He had even founded a theory after her called hyper radiance. A very pretty way of saying: she’d lied.

  Flabbergasted, her mother searched for words. She stirred her coffee. She lifted the creamer and erased with her napkin the keloid, yellow-white ring that had accumulated beneath it.

  “While I certainly appreciate your expert opinion,” she replied finally, “every inhabitant of Greater Boston knows that Mary’s story is a story. I’m relieved to know that it still comes as a newsflash to at least two people. But really, Dr. Biedelman—”

  “Call me Roz. I’m not your doctor. I’m not Mary’s doctor either.”

  “—Dr. Biedelman. We’re a very tired family, in case you can’t tell. We are tired, and we are—we’re just tired.”

  Her mother lit a cigarette. She offered one to Dr. Flood, but not to Roz.

  “I understand how tired you must be,” Roz said, eyeing the excluding-cigarette exchange with a practiced brightness. Roz had clearly spent her life pretending not to be bothered by the fact that she was, in some globally recognized way, an irritating person.