Superstition

16

The members of the group read their copies of the document with nods and murmurs of approval. All had contributed something to “Adam's story,” though it was impossible to say now who had come up with which specific element or detail. They'd all spent every free moment they had reading up on the period. Not only was the French Revolution exceptionally well documented, it was also widely popularized. Lavishly illustrated general histories were complemented by academic tomes on specific elements and personalities. They spent two sessions discussing what they'd read and passing around any pictures that had caught their attention-portraits, drawings, sketches, and cartoons of the time.

Drew, who had a flair for charcoal sketching, drew a head and shoulders portrait of Adam as she imagined him. She gave him a strong face with high cheekbones, a fine, slightly Roman nose, dark eyes that had a steady, questioning gaze. He was beardless but had thick, dark hair that he wore relatively short and which fell boyishly across his forehead. His mouth was full and had a hint of humor to it. The picture appealed to everyone else in the group, and from then on hung on the wall as a permanent reminder of the man they were trying to create. Eventually Joanna, as the only writer among them, had been given the job of “typing up” the story and putting all the elements and details they had discussed into some coherent form.

“Barry's checked it out,” Sam said, “and I've had a colleague of mine in the history department do the same. Nobody can find a trace of any Adam Wyatt, or anybody remotely like him, having returned to France with Lafayette.”

“So what do we do now?” Roger asked after a brief silence. “Sit here until he comes knocking at the door?”

“I don't think ghosts knock at doors, Roger,” Sam replied. “It kind of defeats the point of being a ghost, I would think.”

Barry rapped the table with his knuckles and made a funny voice. “Let me out, let me out!”

Maggie smiled. “You know, I'm still not sure we should have called him Wyatt. Every time I hear the name I think of Wyatt Earp. It makes it a bit hard to take him seriously.”

“According to Sam, if we take him too seriously he's not going to work,” Ward Riley said, leaning back, arms folded. “If I've understood the principle of this thing correctly, we could have sent Mickey Mouse to France and gotten the same results.”

“Or lack of results,” Roger added with a twitch of his mustache, then quickly held up his hand to forestall what he felt was a general protest. “All right, I know…give it time. Meanwhile, what precisely do we do?”

“We sit and talk about Adam,” Sam said, “and any other subject that might take our fancy. The important thing is we get used to being in each other's company. When that happens, maybe Adam will choose to join us.”

Joanna's arrangement with her editor, Taylor Freestone, was that she would be regarded for the moment as on full-time assignment to the “ghost story.” She knew, however, that this exclusivity would last three weeks at most. If results had not begun to appear by then, she would be regarded as available for other jobs in between her twice-weekly sessions with the group.

She copied Taylor on Adam Wyatt's fictitious life story and gave him digests of her notes on the theory and process of what they were attempting. After two weeks, these memos began to look more like delaying tactics than dispatches from the front. She could feel skepticism beginning to replace enthusiasm in Taylor Freestone's attitude. “It'll take as long as it takes,” was all she could tell him.

“I suspect we haven't filled out Adam's story enough for us all to believe in him,” Sam said at the beginning of their next session. “Until we imagine his day-to-day life better than we do he's still no more real than a character in a book.”

Barry said that he thought they all sensed his day-to-day life pretty well. It was true, they'd added a lot of detail. They knew where he lived in Paris, they'd described the house, and they'd imagined at length his small cheteau and estate in the country. They'd even wondered why, in an age before routine contraception, he and Angelique didn't have children. Their answer was that it simply hadn't happened. Although there were any number of medical conditions that might have been responsible, they hadn't settled upon one, making the excuse that neither Adam nor Angelique had been particularly troubled by the matter and had assumed that, given time, she would inevitably get pregnant. By common consent it was agreed that they were physically attracted to each other and had a good sex life.

“We've talked about what they eat, the sort of places they go, the people they see,” Roger said. “What else is there? Inner monologue? Dreams? Personal growth?”

“I don't think they'd invented personal growth then,” Ward Riley said with a half-smile. “That only happened when psychoanalysis connected with California.”

Joanna noted with interest that Ward Riley was showing the least sign of impatience of anyone in the group. There was a calmness in him that became more apparent the longer one was in his company. She supposed it was a consequence of his preoccupation with Eastern philosophy. She wondered if he meditated or practiced yoga or followed any other special discipline, and made a mental note to ask him.

“‘By his friends shall ye know him.’”

Everybody looked at Pete, who had spoken.

“I think it's a quote, but I'm not sure where from.”

Joanna said she thought the quote was “deeds” not “friends,” but she wasn't sure either, and certainly couldn't say where it came from. But they all got the point.

“The question is,” Drew said, “do we invent his friends, or use real people? If we invent too many characters we risk losing focus on Adam.”

“Drew's right,” Barry said, “about losing focus, I mean. What we need to do is place him among real people who aren't so famous that they feel like storybook figures.”

The trouble was they'd all been reading up on the revolution, so that all the main players in it were fixed in their minds and difficult to maneuver into some new scenario of their own without striking a fatally false note. Joanna smiled to herself, remembering the Hollywood screenwriter she'd had a brief fling with a few years ago. He'd told her about “the curse of the Hollywood biopic,” where characters in top hats and tailcoats greet each other in the street with lines like “Morning, Ibsen,”“Morning, Grieg.”

“There are perhaps one or two characters from history who aren't quite so well known as to be almost cliches.” Riley leaned forward slightly as he spoke, crossing his legs, hands cupping his elbows. “Also they're colorful enough to-what shall I say? — spice up the story a little, stimulate the imagination.”

Everyone looked at him expectantly. “Go on,” Sam said, as though having a shrewd idea what was about to come up.

“I was thinking about Cagliostro and Saint-Germain,” Riley said.

Pete laughed. “Sounds like a conjuring act in Vegas.”

“Well, you're not far from the truth,” Riley told him. “They were magicians in a sense, though not a double act. They were adventurers, charlatans, and quite possibly geniuses. Both claimed to have occult powers and to belong to secret societies going back to the dawn of time. Interestingly, there is evidence that they were responsible for a number of remarkable cures, not to mention good old standby miracles like turning base metal into gold.”

“Alchemists!” Roger said with a snort of disdain.

“Yes, alchemists. But there was more to it than telling fortunes and deluding the gullible.”

“They believed in astrology.”

“And numerology. And so did Jung, who said that the ten years he spent studying alchemy were some of the most important of his life.”

“All psychoanalysts are mad. I wouldn't send my dog to one.”

“I'm with Ward on this,” Barry said. “You can't just dismiss all of that stuff out of hand. I'm sorry, Roger, I know you're a smart guy and all, but that's just narrow minded and arrogant. There's too much evidence. You may not like it, but it's there.”

“I stand corrected,” Roger said amiably, holding up his hands in surrender. “By all means, write them in if you want to.”

“The only problem,” Barry continued, turning to Ward, “is that from what I've read Cagliostro left Paris just before the revolution, and Saint-Germain had died.”

“Cagliostro was at the height of his fame when Adam arrived in Paris. They could well have met in fashionable salons. Then in 1785 he got mixed up in a financial scandal involving some woman friend of Marie Antoinette's and a devious cardinal. He was thrown into the Bastille for a spell-along with the Marquis de Sade, incidentally-then banished from France. He died in Italy in 1795.”

Maggie had given a little shiver of distaste at the mention of the Marquis de Sade. “I don't think we want to get mixed up with all that, do we?”

“I'm not suggesting we do,” Ward said. “But the fact is these people were around. And whatever else you may think of them, they were remarkable men. Adam could easily have met Cagliostro or de Sade in the circles he moved in in Paris. Saint-Germain died in 1786, but the legend was that he'd lived many times before and has been reborn since. Witnesses claim to have seen him in Paris in 1789 trying to warn the king of revolution. Since then he's been seen in the Himalayas as a monk, and even in Chicago, of all places, in 1930.”

There was a murmur of amusement around the table at this last reference. “Shit, let's have him over to supper,” Pete said. “Oh, excuse my French, Maggie.”

“That's all right,” Maggie said. “But I'm not sure that I like all this talk at all. Our Adam was a nice, clean-living young man and we're getting him involved with some very strange people. I don't know why, but it makes me uneasy.”

“We're not getting him involved with anyone unless we all agree,” Sam said.

“I think it's too late for that,” Drew said quietly, oddly thoughtful. “We've talked about them, so they're in our minds now, just as much as Adam is.” Her tone of voice suggested that she shared Maggie's misgivings.

“I wouldn't worry about it,” Sam said. “When you think how many bogeymen we already have in our heads who haven't done us any harm so far…”

“I wasn't thinking about us,” Drew interrupted him, not contradicting him but clarifying what she meant. “I was worried about Adam.”

There was a silence in the room. Then Drew spoke the thought that they were all thinking.

“Did you hear that? I talked about him as though he was real.”