The Captive Condition (2 page)

On the left bank stood the college, with its perpendicular walkways and neo-Georgian buildings that mimicked Ivy classicism. Across the street, on the other side of Anderson Boulevard, there was a neighborhood of Victorian-era homes that had fallen into a state of near decrepitude, the pretty flower boxes and decorative dogwoods doing little to disguise the steady and irreversible decay. The wicked winds of a hundred winters had bled most of the houses of color, peeling away huge swathes of paint from the polygonal towers, wraparound porches, and intricate latticework. Shattered pieces of slate tile dangled from leaking roofs, long planks of warped wood rotted behind hedgerows full of nesting blackbirds, and in backyards sturdy swing sets rusted in a lush jungle of weeds. Though it had fallen on hard times, this neighborhood was still vaguely suburban, thanks in part to a new generation of faculty members on the lookout for rock-bottom real estate prices. No doubt some of them saw themselves as missionaries who could teach “the naturals” the benefits of civilization and the necessity of self-reliance. A few had even turned down an opportunity to move into a new housing development three miles away so they could live in this rural dystopia with its many dark doorways and many dark windows.

What Normandy Falls lacked in intellect it made up for in brawn, a town with the pounding of machinery in its soul, the soot of factories and railroad yards in its blood. On the right bank of the river, surrounding the village square, stood the remains of a now-defunct center of industry, ten square blocks of abandoned factories and empty machine shops and blighted warehouses, some dating back to the early twentieth century, giant firetraps of knob-and-tube wiring, exposed-brick walls, galvanized pipes, and ancient ductwork, where a century earlier throngs of hollow-eyed, underfed immigrant children worked fourteen-hour days.

I ambled along these dingy streets and alleys, marveling at the extraordinary human propensity for uprooting trees and grasslands in favor of gravel lots and barbed-wire fences. Occasionally, I stopped to admire the crude graffiti covering the slate sidewalks, the cryptic gang symbols, the obligatory cock and balls, the rare profession of true love. I passed a sleazy cabaret housed in an old movie palace. When it first opened its doors in this ragged corner of the county, the cabaret attracted groups of college boys and a few traveling salesmen in wrinkled suits and unpolished shoes marked by the soft dust of the open road, but now everyone said the place was fast becoming the regular haunt of men whose lives were so far beyond redemption that even the daft pastor who ran the clapboard church on the square railed against their “septic contagion, their night-spawned and leprous madness!”

From the corner I could see the dented church steeple. It looked like a hypodermic needle pricking the white rump of the sky, its syringe filled with windy hymns and diluted sermons that failed to inoculate the town against a devastating plague of sin. Any alleviation of the symptoms proved temporary at best. In the past few decades, on at least three separate occasions, the steeple had been struck by fiery scraps of space junk tumbling end over end out of the upper atmosphere, and now its spire was dinged and battered, its belfry punched with holes, its stately white tower scarred, blackened, burned. “A sign from God!” proclaimed the pastor, who'd been reduced to a state of shuddering insecurity. To the empty pews he railed, “Instead of lightning and tornadoes, the Lord has updated his signs and wonders so we can recognize that the End Times are fast approaching. Soon we will be free. But free from whom? From our fellow man? Or from God Himself? For the whole of the Bible can be summarized thusly: in the Old Testament God kills man; in the New Testament man kills God. Between these two ill-mannered lunatics, who do you suppose is the more hardhearted?”

Up and down the main drag, a parade of backfiring coupes and pickups interrupted these fevered sermons, poisoning the air with death metal, thrash metal, speed metal, the bass on the stereos cranked to maximum volume. From the tinted windows, rosy-cheeked frat boys and sallow-skinned townies shouted menace and insult at passersby. They disparaged women and children; they would have defamed the pastor, too, had he dared to leave the sanctuary of his church. Every weekend an advancing horde of raving, testosterone-crazed men invaded the strip, prowling the town in packs of three and four, looking for an old-fashioned barroom brawl, an overnight in the clink, a real shitshow to boast about on Monday morning, a story they could embellish each time they told it to doubtful friends. While it was nice to see the social classes mingling, I had a hard time distinguishing one group from another, rich from poor, highborn from hick, their faces ferocious with drugs and alcohol, their features washed away by the pale afternoon light slashing diagonally through a cloud bank.

Rather than connect these two parts of town, the great arch bridge acted as a kind of giant guillotine, separating the brain from the body. Its long deck spanned the high granite walls of a gorge where the roiling river became an impressive waterfall that dropped along several ledges of bedrock and spilled into the valley. There the swift river forged a path through fallow fields and an old-growth forest to the tempestuous Great Lake ten miles to the north. Part of an ancient glacial moraine, the valley was rife with tragedy, past and present, and the bridge, ever since its construction fifty years ago, had been a favorite spot for manic-depressives of every stripe—for professors in tweed blazers and knit ties, for laborers in denim coveralls and steel-toed boots, for heartbroken college students, their uncorrupted souls freshly scarred by sorrow, for the destitute and depressed, the fed up, the inconsolable, the outraged. They scaled the barrier, clung to the rail, and then threw themselves off. How many regretted their decision as they plummeted through the air before hitting the canopy of hardwood trees? The drop was over one hundred feet, and most people ricocheted off the sturdy limbs, snapped their necks on the ashes and oaks, dead before they even hit the smooth bedstraw and creeping buttercups that blanketed the ground. One or two landed in the middle of the river, their bodies floating like driftwood to the lake. In time they either dissolved into fish food or were dredged up by weekend boaters weighing anchor. Those residents blessed with a more sardonic sense of humor joked that the sandbar a half mile offshore had become the town's unofficial cemetery.

Hoping to catch a glimpse of the starveling white-tailed deer that came here to graze on the gray-headed coneflowers and white snakeroot growing from the rocky soil, I leaned over the concrete barrier and listened to the persistent song of falling waters. Soon forest rangers, waiting in camouflaged tree blinds, rifle barrels poking through the leaves, would begin to thin their numbers. I wondered what became of the carcasses. Usually the remains ended up in a rendering plant at the edge of town. Animal fat was a key ingredient in cosmetics. Men shoveled the blubber into steaming kettles, turning it into an oil reduction, all so a woman, with a quick daub of color, could transform her face into a macabre mask. Thinking of the long life ahead of me, I followed a deer path that curled against steep, shale cliffs and immense slabs of bedrock until it reached the valley floor.

For the next hour I traveled along a gravel road that unfurled through great, empty, mist-strangled meadows and skirted pestilential bogs, and for reasons that remain unclear to me I felt like I had assumed a new identity, a new way of life. I was now a nameless wanderer, unknown and unclaimed, and I marveled at the immensity of the poetically weathered terrain. Above the valley walls, wheeling in slow circles across the inverted bowl of the sky, an owl searched for carrion. In the distance, poking through a haze of withered grain, a wrought-iron gate creaked back and forth in a breath of cold wind. Tall and ominous and heavy, it looked like the entrance to oblivion. Someone had smashed the padlock to bits and had cut the heavy chain wrapped around its rusty bars, but as I approached along a carpet of red-brown pine needles, I grew uneasy and hesitated to pass through. The gate was set into a wall made from ragged blocks of stone that disappeared into a copse of lightning-scarred trees, and when I placed my hands on the bars I felt a tingling like sparks.

I peered inside and saw a shallow stream that meandered through an untilled scrap of forsaken acreage fastened to the valley floor, the soil a dark loam on a foundation of white marl and chalk. On the horizon, as the sun shed its sickly white light, I spotted the wooden shell of a barn, a simple A-frame structure that looked like a capsized ark adrift in a sea of undulating yellow waves. That the barn was still standing at all seemed a miracle. Between the rocky walls of the valley and the rolling foothills to the east, there was nothing to protect a rickety structure of significant size. In every direction there stretched a dull patchwork of fields sown with ancient glacial rubble that acted as a conduit for epic storms, feeding the tall, trundling clouds with enough heat and moisture to build into angry black anvils. With alarming regularity the sky unleashed cyclones that corkscrewed down and barreled dumb and pitiless across the county, wreaking havoc on the lives of so many families and burying the dead beneath piles of debris, bowed and jagged and impenetrable.

The gates were ornamented with a fine, tangled ironwork forming the letters
T
and
W
in Gothic script. I knew what the letters meant, and immediately I recalled my meeting with the headmaster. No one could say for certain what Father Montague was thinking—very few people had access to his inner arcanum—but in his eyes I saw an unfamiliar quality of mercy, a look of genuine concern, maybe even pity, as he spoke his parting words to me: “Oh, son, if only you knew what you were getting yourself into.”

When certain seeds are planted they almost always grow, and on that September afternoon, as I stood in the moist sod and damp shadows, I felt a deepening sense of exile, a small tremor of self-doubt, and I conjured up an awful image of the mad doctor who ventured to this lonely place to conduct his experiments on the unsuspecting inhabitants of the town. A simplistic explanation, I supposed, for the terrible things that happened here so long ago. In academic circles it had become fashionable to dismiss the universality of human fervor, criticizing one man for clinging to outrageous and murderous doctrines while seeing others as innocent and blameless, but all people at some point get caught up in pure lunacy, and surely the natives of the valley, with their superstitions and totems and exaggerated oral histories, had to contend with their own manias and delusions.

Until the ghosts of Normandy Falls appeared more than five years later and led me through the snowfields, I remained mysteriously free of dangerous ideas, and though I neither expect nor solicit belief, I maintain that the following account is based largely on an honest recollection of the incontrovertible and at times incriminating facts. Since I am an aspiring writer and know a little about the structure of stories, I will describe what I experienced during my final days in that dreary town, but what you must first understand is that, in order to provide this narrative with the proper context it requires, I will need to embellish a detail or two, insert a snippet of conversation, make an educated guess as to what others were thinking. Because every story is an unavoidable mixture of fact and fiction, a limited theme with unlimited variations, and this particular story, the one I will now attempt to tell, is at least in that sense no different from any other. Readers are at liberty to entertain their doubts.

The problem is this: Normandy Falls, in all its gruesome comedy, in all its colorful and agreeable horror, could never properly prepare me for the experiences that awaited me on the other side of those gates. Regrettably, the best I can do is render one version of that unhappy fiasco, and I must rely on my imperfect memory, a thing that, like the Wakefield River, flows with maddening predictability in one direction only, far from its mysterious and secret source.

Friday, August 29–Monday, September 1, 2014

“There should be a law,” said Professor Martin Kingsley, “a law of nature as well as a law of man, something written into the fabric of the cosmos and hardwired into human consciousness. People should take the wedding vows only after they turn thirty. They need a certain amount of wisdom before committing themselves to marriage, certain kinds of experiences, awful experiences, to harden the soul before a long, brutal winter.”

Mrs. Emily Ryan carefully considered the meaning of these words and then repeated them with mild apprehension—or was cruel derision dripping from the tip of her tongue that fine summer day? Kingsley could never be entirely sure.

“A long, brutal winter…”

“Yes,” he said. “A simple, almost innocuous injunction, don't you think?”

As an associate professor of comparative literature, Kingsley had developed the habit, a boring one, some might argue, of thoroughly analyzing any subject that had even a tangential bearing on his ambitious work in progress, a heavily footnoted, exegetical tome exploring the influences of
Madame Bovary
on contemporary culture, and because he framed every topic of conversation as an argument, he often left Emily wondering if he was joking or being sincere; it had something to do with the pitch and timbre of his voice, the way the final syllable of each enthusiastic syllogism reached a manic falsetto, and he tried to compensate for this “disorder,” as he referred to it, by adding with a kind of infantile whine, “But I'm being perfectly
serious,
” which served only to confuse Emily all the more.

As if trying to pacify a pouting child, she patted his hand and said, “I suppose you're right. I was only twenty when I married Charlie. Is that what you're getting at?”

Unaccustomed to being challenged, Kingsley crossed his arms and thought for a moment. “Well, would you say things have worked out pretty well between the two of you?”

She took an experimental sip of her drink and turned her face toward the sun. A rare day in late August: scant humidity, temperature in the mid-70s, a soothing northerly breeze stirring the maples and oaks, the leaves sounding like a gently breaking surf, clouds like enormous pink conch shells resting undisturbed at the bottom of a clear blue sea; and for Emily Ryan it was the hour of the Red Death—one cup of pomegranate juice, a heaping tablespoon of sugar, and half a lemon squeezed into a tall jar of hillbilly hooch that she managed to procure from the Gonk.

“At twenty,” she said, “most people are still going through the late stages of adolescence, and an adolescent should never make big decisions. But Charlie made those kinds of decisions for me. Back then he seemed so much wiser. He was opposed to cohabitation. Living in sin, he called it. We had to be married first. That's what you don't understand about my husband. He isn't an old-fashioned romantic. And he sure isn't the sentimental sort. No, he's a hard-core traditionalist who wanders around the house humming church hymns.” In a small, lilting voice she sang, “Be not afraid, I go before you always…”

There was a strong gust, and on the clothesline the white bedsheets came to life, a swarm of angry spirits thrashing at the sky. With eyes that had seen great heights of agitation, Emily regarded those boisterous, billowing spooks like an adept medium determined to interrogate the dearly departed, and when she turned again to Kingsley, she spoke with an intense and humorless smile.

“I haven't told anyone this, but my husband is superstitious. He believes in things, crazy things, in ghosts and goblins and mischievous devils taking possession of people's bodies. To him sin isn't an abstract, philosophical concept. It's a real thing. Part of the natural order. He smells it in the air he breathes, tastes it in the food he eats.”

Kingsley laughed uneasily and shifted in his seat. Unlike the other neighborhood women, Emily could lighten the mood with a charming anecdote, an amusing turn of phrase, but lately she revealed things better kept private, and any talk of her husband's delusions made Kingsley, who had yet to set foot in the church near the town square, more than merely uncomfortable; it made him cringe with embarrassment and even a little fear.

Ten years her senior and away from home six months out of twelve, Charlie Ryan seemed more like a phantom than a real man. He was a merchant marine and veteran deckhand who spent half the year on the
Rogue,
a bulk carrier that cruised the Great Lakes from the Port of Cleveland to Mackinac Island to the remote Canadian outposts dotted along Lake Superior. During his time away from home, he expected Emily to raise the children without his help, and the long, lonely months left her depleted, beaten down, slightly hunched, a sad soul with a haunted disposition.

“I need a refill!” she announced and smacked her lips. “How about you, Professor? You ready for one?”

He was genuinely alarmed by the amount of booze she could put away before lunch, but he knew it was unwise to berate her for her excesses. These languid summer afternoons tended to be far more pleasant whenever she imbibed a gentle philter or two. If he hadn't made the blunder of cocking an eyebrow and using the same condescending and self-righteous tone he used when addressing his less ambitious graduate students, he might have convinced her to slow down. She smirked and defiantly added a second splash of moonshine, precious stuff, not something to waste on an ordinary day. But today was no ordinary day.

By law and the will of the people, the county was a dry one, home of the Anti-Saloon League, but the citizens of Normandy Falls, while they had conservative views (“cautious” was the word they preferred) about some social issues, nevertheless insisted on proving that their town could be a lovely oasis of sin in a desert of reactionary politics and morality. The establishment of private clubs was one way to skirt the draconian laws of the religious right and create a safe haven for unrepentant hedonists, but for the privilege of enjoying a bottle of beer at the cabaret or a glass of wine at the bistro, loyal patrons were obliged to pay steep prices. The locals preferred to barter for the grain alcohol brewed in backwoods distilleries, and Emily Ryan, a true townie born and bred, always kept an emergency supply squirreled away in her kitchen cupboards.

“I have to admit,” she said, “this stuff tastes a lot better when you're sitting on the beach. Do you know Charlie hasn't treated me to a vacation in years? Not since our sixth wedding anniversary.”

Kingsley knew she harbored fantasies about running away from Normandy Falls and seeing the wide world. Her already unbearable isolation was made that much worse by the extraordinarily vicious and largely unpredictable tantrums of her eight-year-old twin girls. She'd become so desperate to hear the voice of another rational human being that she was even willing to tolerate a vapid windbag like Martin Kingsley, a man who believed he had permission to speak for all people in all circumstances.

Although he failed to recognize the degree to which she suffered, Kingsley did have enough compassion to invite her on long walks through campus, a section of town Emily normally avoided. In the summertime, when he was transformed from a promising young professor into a stay-at-home dad, the primary caregiver of his three-year-old son, Christopher, and wanted to escape from his house as much as she wanted to escape from hers, he offered Emily a small reprieve from the grinding routine. They took leisurely strolls along the quiet cobblestone lanes of campus, their children either lagging far behind or running well ahead of them. They passed under green archways of elms that shaded them in arboreal innocence, their voices dampened by the rumble of lawnmowers and the drone of hedge trimmers as a ragtag crew of groundskeepers, frequent guests of the state and federal corrections system, descended on the quad.

To strangers, Kingsley and Emily must have looked like a married couple with three little ones in tow, but in a small college town where there were few strangers and gossip was ubiquitous, discretion was a game everyone was obliged to play. The rules were easy enough to master—never walk too close together, or accidentally brush shoulders, or gaze into each other's eyes—but after several awkward encounters with colleagues and students, Kingsley persuaded Emily that it was a lot less complicated to stay put in her backyard beside the pool where people wouldn't see and secretly cast judgment upon them.

Now they relaxed in a pair of wooden Adirondack chairs and watched the children doggy-paddle around the perimeter of the pool. In this neighborhood of Victorian-era houses, the inground pool was a bit of an anachronism and something of an eyesore—at night it swarmed with amphibious insects and became a pond for the occasional croaking frog—but during the day it served its purpose well. Christopher hitched up his sagging swim shorts and splashed along the edge in a small life preserver. He babbled contentedly to himself while Emily's identical twin girls, Madeline and Sophie, tossed a beach ball back and forth. For once they didn't continually interrupt the conversation like two old-maid chaperones with the demands of the chronically cranky and incontinent: “We're thirsty! We're tired! We want to watch television!”

It was difficult for Kingsley to disguise his feelings for the girls: he found them not merely obnoxious and irritating, which is how he characterized most children, including a few of his students, but abnormally sinister. Though they were only eight years old, they possessed a rugged masculinity and were built like their father—thick, solid, broad shouldered, with eyes so dark and glassy they seemed to be made from perfectly polished pieces of obsidian. Mass murderers of spiders, flies, moths, and the exceptionally brilliant brush-footed butterflies that sailed above the surface of the water, the girls constantly hunted for easy prey. They also proved to be accomplished mimics who delighted in doing impersonations of adults, especially of “Plucky Prolixy Professor King-silly,” aping his vocabulary with unnerving precision in a single singsong voice and then squealing with malicious, porcine laughter whenever he shot them a weary and wounded look.

While they certainly enjoyed roughhousing poor, defenseless Christopher, scratching his face, pulling his hair, stomping on his tiny toes, they reserved the brunt of their wickedness for their long-suffering mother, relishing their roles as jailers and persecuting her in ways that only the most heartless of wardens can. Clever, calculating, supremely subversive, they understood intuitively that parenthood was a kind of indefinite prison sentence, one in which beleaguered moms and dads, as a general rule, spent most of their days sequestered from other adults, and from the moment they muscled their way out of the womb, the girls seemed to prattle a maddening refrain: “We condemn you, Mommy, to a decade of solitary confinement.”

By this time the girls had already driven Emily quite mad, and Kingsley speculated that the only reason they still lived in the same house with their mother was because a mother's love was unconditional. Ordinary love wouldn't have been enough, not in their case. The love had to be absolute, otherwise they would have found themselves wandering the nighttime streets like a pair of wretched, half-starved urchins out of a folktale, searching through trash cans and dumpsters for rancid scraps of food and seeking shelter in abandoned barns.

Mulling over the infinite possibilities, Kingsley leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes. He envisioned Emily deserting the girls in a Dickensian orphanage, a troll-infested forest, a vast wildlife preserve teeming with ravenous jackals and hyenas. He pictured in exquisite detail smoking electric chairs and old-fashioned firing squads—fusillading, the French called it, which made execution seem almost enlightened. He saw those two chortling brats, handcuffed and blindfolded, cigarettes dangling from the corners of their mouths, standing against a bullet-ridden wall in a prison courtyard; watched the decorated commandant give the signal, the soldiers raise their rifles; and for a split second, in the stillness of the summer day, mistook a backfiring car for the sudden crack of gunshots. Beyond these delightfully gruesome images he would not allow his mind to wander, because, as he liked to remind his students, “An unrestrained imagination poses certain dangers to its owner.”

In the dazzling sunshine his daydreams seemed harmless enough, particularly when the breeze died and the ripples on the pool vanished so that its smooth surface rolled back and forth in silver filaments of light, but with the girls lurking nearby it never took long for an idyllic scene to turn sour. Gliding stealthily along the shallow bottom like a couple of perversely smiling moray eels, Madeline and Sophie found Christopher's legs and lavished their pinches upon him. Blue in the face and gasping for air, they rocketed to the surface to shout in their victim's ears, one girl on either side for proper stereophonic effect, “We love you, Christopher, we do, like a brother we do!”

When they grew tired of this game, they ran helter-skelter around the pool, fishing for compliments, doing a late-summer saraband, jackknifing and cannonballing in the deep end. Then they raced across the yard to the clothesline, where they wrapped themselves in the white sheets and shouted, “Booo!”

Emily jumped from her chair. “You monsters, I just cleaned those!” She tried to coax them back into the water, but Madeline and Sophie let out two horrific shrieks that sent the blackbirds flying in a panic from the treetops.

“Well, that's one thing you definitely forgot to consider,” said Emily, slumping into her chair.

“What's that?”

“If people married late in life, there would be far fewer children in this world. The older you get, the less patience you have for them.”

“Ah, yes,” said Kingsley, “it's an engineering problem. If Nature had the capacity to reason properly, if it weren't so blind, it would have made us eager to reproduce beginning in middle age, not before. Think of all the problems that would solve.”