Robert Stone - Death of the Black-Haired Girl

“You don’t read my e-mail, do you?”

“Never mind. Listen,” he said, “I want to tell you something. People’s religion — it’s not like opium. It don’t work that way. It’s their mother, you understand. They may not understand their mother at all. They may hate their mother. Maybe they’re ashamed of their mother. Sometimes a mother makes someone hate other people. Any thing can drive such people to anything.” He thought back for a moment and laughed a little. “When I started swinging a stick they told me: Put ’em in their place, tell ’em what shits they are, but for God’s sake don’t mention their mother.”

“I don’t care,” she said. “I’m proud of what I wrote.”

She thought: I can’t stay here. He will be hurt and upset but I can’t stay here.

So later that day, when he was out to a meeting or taking his walk, she packed her duffel bag and put on Shell’s coat and went to Manhattan, where she knew some girls. When Stack returned he saw that she had gone. He was afraid and disappointed because he had thought she would stay over the holiday. At least he had thought that before the brouhaha over the article. Dizzy, he stayed on his feet.

“Barbara!” he called. Of course, every time Stack needed his wife, she was dead.

SHELL’S COLLEGE LIFE had lately taken the form of dodging the threatening calls and voicemail messages for Maud. Neither of them used the dorm room phone, but somehow or other someone had got the number. It was worse than after The Harrowing of Hell, when Shell had been compelled to change cell phone numbers again. And now it seemed that while people wanted to kill her and read about her being dead in the tabloids, they wanted to kill her roommate too, for more serious and worthy reasons. Three people had actually appeared at the dorm, gained access and entered in spite of the locks. All three were women; all three wanted to talk with Maud. So for Shell it was not only a matter of being herself but of being Maud’s roommate. There were individuals and groups wandering the campus over Thanksgiving break, carrying signs about Maud. Maud, Shell thought, would never be able to cope.

An added thrill arose from the fact that the whole issue had afforded yet another conversion experience for Shell’s insane ex-husband. The experience left John Clammer awash in insight. John was able to understand now that the breakup of his marriage had been caused by Hell House — his name for the college — when it cleverly placed his wife with a demon adversary who had converted her to Lesbian Law. The enthusiast Clammer was organizing an expedition to rescue her, dead or alive.

An e-mail from her mother set out to explain the spiritual adventures of John Clammer. Shell was tired of trying to make sense of her mother’s e-mails; interpreting her day-to-day speech was hard enough, but Shell thought her chances would improve on the telephone. She dialed her mother’s number.

“Tell me quick, Mom. Is John Clammer still locked up?”

“Well, he is.”

“You say he is?”

“Well, yes he is. But at times he isn’t.”

“Uh-oh. What times are those?”

“Well. John, they say, has this mentor, see.”

“That should be good, Mom, ’cuz if any man could use a mentor it’s John Clammer. Why do I have this feeling it’s not an altogether good thing?”

“Well, there’s this man and he’s a preacher and his name is Dr. Russell Fumes. Dr. Fumes used to be the chaplain at that whole place when it was the great ol’ state asylum, it was, and then of course it’s just a teeny tiny place now and his cure of souls got just smaller and smaller. So Dr. Fumes was telling people, Now y’all be sure and tell the doctors that you need my coming round and how important it is. And they, I guess, they just didn’t, or not enough of them did. So you know what was on his mind, he was thinking the hospital would stop paying him if he had no customers.”

“I’m with you, Mom.”

“Well, then he got John Clammer to accept the Lord as he sees ’um, and John told them he had to have this man Fumes. So Fumes come forward and says he’ll take this man under his pastoral care and I guess they said cool because he’s goin’ aroun’ with Dr. Russell Fumes.”

“Goin’ around with him? Where the fuck they goin’ around to? Don’t the court know I got a restraining order on that boy?”

“Well shit, honey, you don’t see him around anywhere, do you?”

“I want you to make sure you know where he is, you hear! I know you can do that. Every couple days I wanna be reassured I can rehearse and perform and like that without having to shoot that sucker.”

“Call your lawyer.”

“I mean, that would look like hell, wouldn’t it? I gotta shoot my crazy husband? Probably gotta shoot old Dr. Fumes too. Cute onscreen no more, Mom. I’ll be a Fatty Arbuckle.”

“Be what you gotta be, sweetie. He probably ain’t interested in you no more. Everything ain’t all about you no more.”

ONE COLD MORNING, AFTER Maud’s piece had appeared and protest demonstrations against it had begun, Jo Carr walked up College Hill to take a shift at Whelan Hospital. The wind at the top of the hill blew hard and the demonstrators had not arrived, but the Indian flute players were huddled near the glass hospital doorways cradling their instruments. With them was a man Jo thought she recognized. She had been trying to put the sense of recognition beyond her awareness. The sight of him brought her a thrill of fear that reached over time, distance and agonies of spirit.

He reminded her for all the world of a former priest who had called himself the Mourner. That priest had been one of her own order, a Devotionist in South America. She had known him only briefly then, and though she had not seen him for many years, she heard from time to time about his street theater. His movement raised money through the street performances of Andean music. He was the person she had been reminded of in the dark eyes of the young woman who sang with the montañeros.

A few days later, on a weekend evening, she was reading alone in the counseling office. The office was mainly below the sidewalk, but the upper third of the window commanded a view of the pavement, a drain full of frozen leaves and the footwear of passersby. When she had first taken the job years before, she had thought the office a strange place: a rather cast-down room in which to rouse depressed, confused or homesick students from their misery. For a while the counseling office had occupied the lobby floor of a downtown office building, sleek and sixties-modern. Now it had been shifted to this cellar of improvisatory afterthought. Owing to a confluence of ironies, counseling had been downgraded in the ranking nomenclature of the college.

There had been a time when students were simply expected to follow the rules and keep their own counsel. At the end of that era, the introduction of a dozen therapies, from gestalt to transformational breathing, collided with a crisis of confidence in these therapies, with extended individual rights and with the disappearance of in loco parentis as a defining relationship between institution and student. Then there was the expansion of legal liability. All at once it seemed that while nobody was responsible for anything, everybody was responsible for everything. In any case, Jo had low seniority in the counseling service and a subterranean chamber to go with it. But she had a following as a sympathetic presence, a word-of-mouth credibility passed along by students who managed to find her.

She had been at the desk with her uneasiness for a few minutes when the bell at the street door rang. Lone women — everyone — tended to proceed with caution around the college after dark. There were frequent buses and group safety routes. Jo went up the half flight of stairs to the street level and, looking through the solid glass doors at the building’s main entrance, saw him on the sidewalk outside. A tall, thin man in his fifties with a scarred face stood in the lighted doorway. He was wearing a black beret, which he was stuffing into his overcoat pocket as he reached for the doorbell again. All the other offices in her building had closed and the street was winter dark. When he saw her through the glass door his eyes came alight. She let him in and gave him a chair in the office.