Confessions of a Crap Artist

10

In order to visit Charley in the University of California Hospital at Fourth and Parnassus, in San Francisco, I had to take the 6:20 Greyhound bus from Inverness. That got me to San Francisco at 8:00 in the morning. I generally went to the San Francisco public library, where I read the new magazines, picked out books that Charley might like, and did reseanch. Now that he had had his heart attack, I did research on the circulatory system, copying scientific information into notebooks, and, when possible, checking out the actual reference books and articles to take to him to read.

When he saw me coming into his noom, with my knapsack filled with library books and technical magazines, he almost always said, “Well, Isidore, what’s the latest on my heart?”

I gave him what information I had been able to pick up from hospital personnel on his condition and how soon he might expect to get out and back to the house. He seemed to appreciate this detailed account; without me he got the usual clichés about his condition, so to an extent he was dependent on me.

After I had given him the scientific information I got out the notebook that I used for information concerning the situation back at Drake’s Landing.

“Let’s hear the latest on the old homestead,” he almost always said.

On this particular occasion, I referred to my notebook to get my facts in order, and then I said, “Your wife is beginning to become involved with Nathan Anteil in extramarital relationships.”

I had intended to go on, but Charley stopped me. “What do you mean?” he said.

“For the last four days,” I said, checking my facts, “Nathan Anteil has come over in the evening without his wife. And he and Fay have talked in such a way as to suggest a romance between them.”

I did not enjoy giving him this information, but I had set out to keep him apprised of the situation at home; I had made it part of my job, in exchange for what I received in the way of food and lodgings. Along with my other chores bringing him information was my duty, and it had to be scrupulously done, with regard only for accuracy and completeness.

“They sat together on Thursday night drinking martinis until two a.m.,” I informed him.

“Well,” he said presently. “Go on.”

“At one point—they were seated together on the couch—he put his arm around her and kissed her. On the mouth.”

Charley said nothing. But obviously he was listening. So I continued.

“Nathan didn’t actually come out and say that he loved your wife—”

Charley interrupted, “I don’t give a damn.”

“How do you mean?” I said. “You mean you don’t give a damn about that particular piece of information on—”

He interrupted, “I don’t give a damn about the whole subject.” He was silent for a long time and then he said, “What else happened at the old homestead during the week? And don’t give me any more on that topic, about him on her. Tell me about the ducks.”

“The ducks,” I said, glancing at my notes. “The ducks laid a total of thirty eggs since my last report. The Pekins laid the most of that, with the Rouens laying the least.”

He said nothing.

“What else would you like to know?” I asked. “How much egg-gro they consumed?” I had it both by weight and by volume.

“Okay,” he said. “Tell me about that.”

I felt keenly that his failure to take an interest in such an important topic as his wife’s relationship with Nathan Anteil was due to my inability to relate it properly. Obviously I had failed to do justice to it; I had not given him a convincing picture. Had he been present, he would have reacted, but all he had to go on were the barren statements that I presented him. A newspaper on a magazine, when it wants to stir an emotional reaction in its readers, does an expert job of presenting a topic; it does not merely list facts in chronological order, as was my tendency.

Then and there I saw the limitation of my systematic method. As a means of recording significant data it was unexcelled, but as a means of conveying that data to another person, it had no merit. Up to now, my recording and preservation of significant facts had been for my own use … but now I was gathering facts for the use of another person, in this case a man who had little or no scientific education. Looking back, I recalled that in the past a great number of facts that had impressed me had been conveyed in highly dramatized articles, such as those in the American Weekly, and other facts had been conveyed in fictional forms, such as in the stories I read in Thrilling Wonder and Astonishing.

Obviously I had a thing or two to learn. I left the hospital feeling very chagrined, and, for the first time in years, basically questioning myself and my methods.

A day or so later, while spending the afternoon alone in the house, I heard the doorbell chime. I had been folding the laundry that had come out of the clothes drier. Leaving the heaps of clothes on the table I went to open the door, thinking that possibly Fay was back from town and wanted me to carry something in from the can.

When I opened the door I found myself facing a woman that I had never seen before.

“Hello,” she said.

“Hello,” I said.

The woman was quite small, with a huge black pony tail of such heavy hair that I thought she must be a foreigner. Her face had a dark quality, like an Italian’s, but her nose had the bony prominence of an American Indian’s. She had quite a strong chin and large brown eyes that stared at me so hand and fixedly that I became nervous. After saying hello she said nothing at all but smiled. She had sharp teeth, like a savage’s, and that also made me uneasy. She wore a green shirt, like a man’s, out at the waist, and shorts, and gold sandals, and she carried a purse and a manila envelope and a pair of sunglasses. I saw parked in the driveway a new Ford station wagon painted bright red. In some respects the woman seemed to me breath-takingly beautiful, but at the same time I was aware that something was wrong with her proportions. Hen head was slightly too large for her shoulders—although it may have been an illusion due to her heavy black hair—and her chest was somewhat concave, actually hollow, not like a woman’s chest at all. And her hips were too small in proportion to her shoulders, and then, in order, her legs were too short for her hips, and her feet too small for her legs. So she resembled an inverted pyramid.

It came to me that although this woman was in her thirties, she had the figure of a somewhat underweight but very good-looking fourteen-year-old girl. Her body had not matured, only her face. She had not developed beyond a certain point, and this top-heavy effect was not an illusion. If you noticed only her face she seemed absolutely ravishingly beautiful, but if your gaze took in all of her, then you were conscious that there was something wrong with her, something fundamentally out of proportion.

Her voice had a rasping, husky quality, very low-pitched. Like her eyes it had a strong and intense authority to it, and I found myself unable to break away from her gaze. Although she had never seen me before—laid eyes on me, as they say—she acted as if she had expected to see me, as if I was familiar to her. Her smile had a sly certitude to it. After a moment she started forward and I stood aside; she came on into the house, gliding with very small steps and making no sound at all. Apparently she had been there before because she went without hesitation into the living room and put her purse down on one of the tables there, the same table on which Fay always put her purse. Then she turned to look back at me and said,

“Have you been having any pains in your head lately? Around your temples?” She put up her hand and traced a line across her forehead from eye to eye. “I have. Do you know what that is?” She came gliding toward me and stopped a short distance away. “That’s the crown of thorns,” she said. “We all have to wear it before the world can end and a new world take its place. I’m wearing it now. I’ve been wearing it since last Friday, when I ascended the cross and was crucified and then spent a night in the tomb.” Smiling at me, and keeping her large brown eyes fixed on me, she continued, “I slept the whole night outdoors in the cold and never even knew it. My husband and children didn’t know I was missing; it was as if no time had passed. I had been transfigured into eternity. The whole house vibrated—I saw it vibrate, my god, as if it was going to fly up into the sky like a spaceship.”

“I see,” I said, unable to take my eyes away from hers.

“Over the house,” she continued, “there was a huge blue light hanging, like crackling electric fine. I laid on the ground and that fire consumed me, from that spaceship. The whole house became a spaceship ready to go into space.”

I couldn’t help nodding.

In the same tone of voice she went on, “I’m Mrs. Hambro. Claudia Hambro. I live over in Inverness Park. You’re Fay’s brother, aren’t you?”

“Yes,” I said. “Fay isn’t here; she went into town.”

“I know,” Mrs. Hambro said. “I knew that when I woke up this morning.” She walked over to the window, looked out at the sheep, who were going by the fence. Then she turned and seated herself in a chain, crossing her bare legs and setting her purse on her lap; she opened her purse, got out a package of cigarettes, and lit up. “Why did you come here?” she said. “To Drake’s Landing. Do you know the reason?”

I shook my head.

“It’s the force that’s pulling us all together,” she said. “Throughout the world. There’s groups forming everywhere. The message is the same: suffer and die to save the world. Christ was not suffering for our sins, he was suffering to show us the way. We all have to suffer. We all have to ascend the cross to gain eternal life, each in his own way.” She blew smoke from her nostrils up at me. “Christ was from another planet. From a more evolved race. Earth is the most backward planet in the universe. At night I can lie awake—sometimes it really scares me—and listen to them talking. The other night they began to open my head. They cut a flap open this way and one that way.” With her hand she traced lines across her head. “And I heard this terrible noise; it was the loudest noise I have even heard. It absolutely deafened me. You know what it was? It was Aaron’s rod coming down; it appeared in the air before me. Since then I haven’t been able to look at the sun. The cosmic nay intensity is too great; it’s burning our minds out. By the end of May it’ll reach its ultimate and the world will come to an end, according to scientists. The poles are about to switch positions. Did you know that? San Francisco is getting closer to Los Angeles.”

“Yes,” I said. I remembered having read that in the newspaper.

“The most evolved beings of all live in the sun,” Mrs. Hambro went on. “They’ve been entering my head every night now. I’m an initiate. Soon I’ll know the whole mystery. It’s very exciting.” All at once she laughed, showing me her sharp-pointed teeth. “Do you think I’m out of my mind? Are you going to call the loony bin?”

“No,” I said.

She said, “I’ve suffered, but it’s worth it. None of us can hide from it; it’s destiny. You’ve been hiding all your life, haven’t you? But destiny brought you here. Look at this.” Putting her cigarette down on the edge of the coffee table she opened her manila envelope and brought out a folded-up paper; she unrolled it, and I saw an intricate pencil sketch of an old Chinaman. “That’s our guru,” she said. “We’ve never seen him, but Barbara Mulchy drew that under hypnotic suggestion when we asked to see He Who’s Leading us. No one has been able to read the inscription. It predates any known language.” She pointed to some Chinese-looking writing at the bottom of the picture. “He drew you up here to Drake’s Landing,” she said. “He’s been guiding you all your life.”

In many respects what she said was difficult to accept. But certainly it was true that I had felt that I did not understand the real purpose of my life. And certainly I had been brought to Drake’s Landing not of my own free will. -

“Our group has made several scientifically-authenticated sightings,” Mrs. Hambro continued. “We’ve established contact with these evolved superior beings who are in control of the universe and who are directing the cosmic radiation here in an effort to save us from our own anti-christ. I saw the anti-christ last night. They’s why I’m here. I knew then that I had to contact you and get you into our group. We’ve had eleven or twelve people contact us in the last week or so, due to various articles printed in newspapers, some of them facetious in tone.” From this manila envelope she got a newspaper clipping and passed it to me.

The clipping read:

Inverness Park. World War Three will begin before the end of May, and not to destroy man but to save him, according to Mrs. Edward Hambro of Inverness Park, Marin County. The flying saucer group of which she is the spokesman declares that several psychic contacts have been made with the “superior beings who are in control of our lives,” and who “are leading us to material destruction for the purpose of spiritual salvation,” Mrs. Hambro’s words. The group meets once a week to report sightings of UFOs, unidentified flying objects. There are twelve members of the group, from Inverness Park and surrounding towns of north west Marin County. They meet in Mrs. Hambro’s home. “Scientists know that the world is about to explode,” Mrs. Hambro declared. “Either from a build-up of internal pressures, or from man-made atomic radiation. In any case, man must prepare for the end of the world.”

I handed the clipping back to Mrs. Hambro and she returned it to her envelope. “That was in the San Rafael Journal,” she said. “It also appeared in Petaluma newspapers and Sacramento newspapers. They didn’t give a fair impression of what I said.”

“I see,” I said, feeling odd and weak. The strength of her gaze made my head hum. I have never met another person to this day who affected me as much as Claudia Hambro. The sunlight, when it reached her eyes, didn’t reflect in the usual way but was broken up into splinters. That fascinated me. Sitting across from her, not very far from her, I saw a portion of the room reflected in her eyes, and it was not the same; it became bits instead of a single plane of reality. As she talked I kept watching that fragmented light. And never once, in all the time that she talked, did she blink.

“Have you had queer sensations recently, like silk being drawn across your stomach?” she asked me. “Or heard loud whistles, on people talking? I hear them saying, ‘Don’t wake Claudia. It’s not time for her to awake.’

“I have had some sensations,” I said. For the past month I had had a terrible tight feeling around my head, as if my forehead were about to burst. And my nose had been so constricted that I had been almost unable to breathe. Fay had said it was the usual sinus inflammation that people felt so near the ocean, with the strong winds, plus the pollen from all the flowers and trees, but I had never been convinced.

“Are they getting stronger?” Mrs. Hambro asked.

“Yes,” I said.

“Will you be over Friday afternoon?” she said. “To the group? When it meets?”

I nodded.

At that, she arose and put our her cigarette. “If Fay wants to come,” she said, “she’s welcome. Tell her she’s always welcome.” Without another word she left.

Completely overwhelmed, I remained seated where I was.

That evening, when Fay found out that Claudia Hambro had come by, she had a terrible fit.

“That woman’s a nut!” she cried. She was in the bathroom washing her hair at the bowl; I was holding the spray for her and she was rubbing the shampoo out. The girls had gone to their rooms to watch tv. “She’s really out of her mind. My god, she had shock treatment a couple of years ago and she tried to kill herself once. She believes Martians are in touch with us—she has that nutty group that meets over in Inverness Park—they hypnotize people. Her father’s one of the most arch-reactionaries in Marin County, one of the big dairy ranchers out on the Point that’s responsible for our having the worst high school in the fourteen western states.”

I said, “She asked me to come over on Friday and take pant in a meeting of their group.”

“Of course she did,” Fay said. “She tracks down everybody who moves up here. I’ll bet she told you it was ‘destiny that brought you up here.’ Right?”

I nodded.

“They think they’re pawns in the hands of superior beings,” she said, “When actually they’re pawns in the hands of their own subconsciouses, which have run amock. She ought to be in an institution.” Grabbing a towel she pushed rudely past me, and out of the bathroom, down the hall to the living room. Following after her I found her kneeling down in front of the fireplace, drying her hair. “I suppose they’re harmless,” she said. “Maybe it’s better for their systemized schizophrenia to take the form of delusions about superior beings than to go into overt paranoia of a persecution type and imagine people are trying to kill them.”

Hearing Fay say all this, I had to admit that there was a good deal of truth in it. A lot of what Mrs. Hambro had said hadn’t rung right to me; it did have the sound of mental derangement.

But on the other hand, every prophet and saint has been called “insane” by his times. Naturally a prophet would appear insane, because he would hear and see and understand things that no one else could. They would be stoned and derided during their lifetimes, exactly as Christ had been. I could see what Fay meant, but also I could see not a little logic in what Claudia Hambro said.

“Are you going?” Fay said.

“Maybe so,” I said, feeling embarrassed to admit it.

“I knew this would happen,” was all she would say. For the nest of the evening she refused to say another word to me; in fact it wasn’t until the next morning, when she wanted me to go down to the Mayfair and shop for her, that she said anything to me.

“Her whole family’s that way,” Fay said. At the closet she was putting on her suede leather jacket. “Her sister, her father, her aunt—it’s in their blood. Listen, insanity is an infection. Look how it’s infected this whole area, all around Tomales Bay, here. A whole group of people being influenced by that nut. When I first met her three years ago I thought, My god, what an attractive woman. She really is beautiful. She looks like some jungle princess on something. But she impressed me as cold. She has no emotions. She has no capacity to feel normal human emotions. Here she’s got six kids and yet she hates kids; she has no love for them or for Ed. And she’s always pregnant. She’s nuts. It’s the two-year-old mind that controls the world.”

I said nothing.

“She looks like some successful Marin County upper middle class suburban housewife that gives barbecue parties,” Fay said. “And instead she’s a grade A nut.”

Opening the front door she started out.

“I’m going down to San Francisco,” she said. “And visit Charley. You be sure and be here when the girls get home. You know how scared they are to get home and find nobody here.”

“Right,” I said. Since their father’s heart attack, both children had had a lot of anxiety during the night, bad dreams for instance, and spells of unmanageability. And Elsie had begun to wet her bed again. Both girls now asked for a bottle each night before going to bed. That probably had a good deal to do with the bed-wetting.

I knew that in actuality she was not going down to San Francisco to see Charley but was going to meet Nat Anteil, probably somewhere between Point Reyes and Mill Valley, possibly in Fairfax, and have lunch with him. They had been having trouble meeting each other, since his wife Gwen had become suspicious of the time they spent together and had insisted on accompanying him over in the evenings. Since his wife no longer permitted him to visit Fay by himself, he and Fay were up against it.

And in a small town where everybody knows everybody, it is very hard, if not impossible, to have a secret relationship. If you go into a bar with somebody else’s wife, you are recognized by everyone who is there, and the next day it’s written up in the Baywood Press. If you stop to buy gas, Earl Frankis, who owns the Standard Station, recognizes your car and you. If you go into the post office, you are recognized because the post master knows everyone in the area; it’s his job. The barber notices you as you walk by his window. The man in the feed store sits at his desk watching the street all day long. All the clerks at the Mayfair Market know everyone, since everyone charges there. So Fay and Nat had to meet outside the area if they were going to meet at all. And if their relationship became a matter of public knowledge, it was not my fault.

However, they had done fairly well in keeping it under cover. When I was downtown shopping, I didn’t hear anybody discussing it, either at the Mayfair or the post office or the drug stone. Several people asked me how Charley was. So they had been discreet. After all, even Nat’s wife was ignorant. All she knew for sure was that he and Fay had been together at Fay’s house several times, and no doubt Nat had told her that I was present, and possibly the two girls. Possibly he and Fay had even concocted a story to explain it—Fay had a set of the Britannica, for instance, and the big Webster’s dictionary, and Nat could always say that he was over using her various reference books. And she had already given the pretext that she needed help with her checkbook. And everybody in north west Marin County knew that Fay called up everyone and asked them for favors; she made use of everybody she met, and the sight of Nat Anteil driving over to her house or being driven over might stir no comment, as such, because he simply became another person ensnared, doing her work for her while she sat out on the patio and smoked and read the New Yorker.

The real fact was that for all her energetic bouncing around, her scaling cliffs and gardening and badminton playing, my sister has always been lazy. If she could she would sleep until noon. Hen idea of work is to spend two evenings a week—four hours—shaping clay pots, something that the Bluebirds did in the afternoon with about as much effort—and to them it was considered fun. The house had six or seven statues that Fay had made, and to me they looked like nothing on earth. Building a trf tuner, in my high school days, I used to spend whole days, ten hours without interruption. I never saw Fay spend more than an hour at any one thing; after that she became bored, stopped, did something else. For instance, she could not bear to iron clothes. It was too tedious for her. She wanted me to try my hand, but I simply couldn’t get the hang of it, and so it had to be taken down to San Rafael to a laundry there. Her idea of work, of creative work, was derived from the progressive nursery schools that she had gone to as a child in the ‘thirties. She had never had to work, as I had done and still do.

But I did not object to doing her work for her, as Charley did and, to some extent, Nat did. I could not be sure how Nat felt, or if he understood that in addition to her having an emotional relationship with him she was also employing him as she employed everyone else around her. In fact, she employed her children. She had persuaded them that it was their job to fix their breakfasts on Saturday and Sunday morning, and until I came she simply refused to cook breakfast for them on the weekends, no matter how hungry they got. Usually they had fixed themselves cocoa and jelly sandwiches and gone off to watch tv until afternoon. I put an end to that, of course, preparing for them an even heartier breakfast than I did on weekdays. It seemed to me that on Sunday especially they should have a really important breakfast, and so I fixed waffles for them, with bacon; sometimes nut waffles, or strawberry waffles—in other words, something that constituted a genuine Sunday breakfast. Charley, too, before his heart attack, appreciated this. Fay, however, complained that I was fixing so much food that she was becoming fat. She actually became irritable when she appeared at the breakfast table and found that instead of grape juice and toast and coffee and applesauce I had prepared bacon and eggs or hash and eggs and cereal and rolls. It made her angry because she wanted to eat it, and having no capacity to deny herself anything, she sooner on later ate what I had fixed, her lower lip stuck out with petulance throughout the meal.

One morning when I got up as usual before anyone else—about seven o’clock—and walked from my bedroom into the kitchen to open the drapes and put on water for Fay’s coffee and generally begin fixing breakfast, I saw that the door to the study had been shut and and locked from the other side. I knew that it had been locked,just to see it, because unless the lock is thrown the door hangs open slightly. Somebody had to be in there, and I suspected that it was Nat Anteil. Sure enough, about seven-thirty when the girls had gotten up and Fay was combing their hair, Nat appeared from the front part of the house.

“Hi,” he said to us.

The girls stared at him, and then Elsie said, “Where did you come from? Did you sleep here last night?”

Nat said, “No, I just walked in the front door. Nobody heard me.” He seated himself at the breakfast table and said, “Could I have some breakfast?”

“Of course,” Fay said, showing no surprise at seeing him. Why should she? But she did not even go through the motions of pretending, of asking him why he had come over so early… after all, nobody comes calling at seven-thirty in the morning.

I put out an extra plate and silverware and cup for him, and presently there he was eating with us, having his grapefruit and cereal and toast and bacon and eggs. He had quite an appetite, as always; he really enjoyed the food that he got to eat, the food that Charley Hume sick in the hospital provided.

As soon as I had cleared the table and done the dishes I went off into my room and sat down on my bed to record, in my notebook, the fact that Nathan Anteil had spent the night.

Later in the morning, after Nat had departed and I was busy sweeping the patio, Fay approached me. “Did it bother you,” she said, “fixing breakfast for him?”

“No,” I said.

With ill-concealed agitation, she hung around me as I worked. Suddenly she burst out in her impatient manner, “You’re no doubt conscious that he spent the night in the study. He was working on a paper last night and he couldn’t make it home he was so tired, so I—said, you can sleep in the study. It’s perfectly all night, but when you go down to visit Charley don’t say anything to him; it might get him all upset for nothing.”

I nodded as I worked.

“Okay?” she said.

“It’s none of my business,” I said. “It’s not my house.”

“True,” she said. “But you’re such a horse’s ass there’s no telling what you might do.”

To that, I said nothing. But as I worked I was busy constructing, in my head, a more vivid method of presenting the true facts to Charley. A dramatization, such as you see on tv when they are showing the effects of, say, Anacin or aspirin. Something to really drive the message home to him.