The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares (24 page)

Exuberantly Alastor cried, “Brother, let’s go! Across the river and to Aunt Alida’s—to our destiny.”

Like a man in a dream Lyle took his place behind the wheel of the Rolls; Alastor climbed in beside him. Lyle’s heart was beating painfully, with an almost erotic excitement. Neither brother troubled to fasten his seat belt; Lyle, who’d perhaps never once driven any vehicle without fastening his seat belt first, seemed not to think of doing so now as if, simply by sliding into this magnificent car, he’d entered a dimension in which old, tedious rules no longer applied. Lyle was grateful for Alastors passing him the silver flask, for he needed a spurt of strength and courage.
He drank thirstily, in small choking swallows: how the whiskey burned, warmly glowed, going down! Lyle switched on the ignition, startled at how readily, how quietly, the engine turned over. Yes, this was magic. He was driving his uncle Gardner King’s Rolls-Royce as if it were his own; as he turned out of the hotel drive, he saw the driver of an incoming vehicle staring at the car, and at him, with frank envy.

And now on the road. In brilliant sunshine, and not much traffic. The Rolls resembled a small, perfect yacht; a yacht moving without evident exertion along a smooth, swiftly running stream. What a thrill, to be entrusted with this remarkable car; what sensuous delight in the sight, touch, smell of the Rolls! Why had he, Lyle King, been a puritan all of his life? What a blind, smug fool to be living in a world of luxury items and taking no interest in them; as if there were virtue in asceticism; in mere ignorance. Driving the Rolls on the highway in the direction of the High Street Bridge, where they would cross the Black River into the northern, affluent area of Contracoeur in which their aunt lived, Lyle felt intoxicated as one singled out for a special destiny. He wanted to shout out the car window
Look! Look at me! This is the first morning of the first day of my new life.

Not once since Alastor’s call that morning had Lyle thought of—what? What had it been? The death-cup mushroom, what was its Latin name? At last, to Lyle’s relief, he’d forgotten.

Alastor sipped from the pocket flask as he reminisced, tenderly, about the old Contracoeur world of their childhood. That world, that had seemed so stable, so permanent, was rapidly passing
now, vanishing into a newer America. Soon, all of the older generation of Kings would be deceased. “Remember when we were boys, Lyle? What happy times we had? I admit, I was a bit of a bastard, sometimes—I apologize. Truly. It’s just that I resented you, you know. My twin brother.” His voice was caressing yet lightly ironic.

“Resented
me
? Why?” Lyle laughed, the possibility seemed so far-fetched.

“Because you were born on my birthday, of course. Obviously, I was cheated of presents.”

Driving the daunting, unfamiliar car, that seemed to him higher built than he’d recalled, Lyle was sitting stiffly forward, gripping the elegant mahogany steering wheel and squinting through the windshield as if he was having difficulty seeing. The car’s powerful engine vibrated almost imperceptibly like the coursing of his own heated blood. Laughing, though slightly anxious, he said, “But, Alastor, you wouldn’t have wished me not to have been born, would you? For the sake of some presents?”

An awkward silence ensued. Alastor was contemplating how to reply when the accident occurred.

Approaching the steep ramp of the High Street Bridge, Lyle seemed for a moment to lose the focus of his vision, and jammed down hard on the brake pedal; except it wasn’t the brake pedal but the accelerator. A diesel truck crossing the bridge, belching smoke, seemed then to emerge out of nowhere as out of a tunnel. Lyle hadn’t seen the truck until, with terrifying speed, the Rolls careened up the ramp and into the truck’s oncoming grille.
There was a sound of brakes, shouts, a scream, and as truck and car collided, a sickening wrenching of metal and a shattering of glass. Together the vehicles tumbled from the ramp, through a low guardrail and onto an embankment; there was an explosion, flames; the last thing Lyle knew, he and his shrieking brother were being flung forward into a fiery-black oblivion.

Though badly injured, the driver of the diesel truck managed to crawl free of the flaming wreckage; the occupants of the Rolls-Royce were trapped inside their smashed vehicle, and may have been killed on impact. After the fire was extinguished, emergency medical workers would discover in the wreckage the charred remains of two Caucasian males of approximately the same height and age; so badly mangled, crushed, burned, they were never to be precisely identified. As if the bodies had been flung together from a great height, or at a great speed, they seemed to be but a single body, hideously conjoined. It was known that the remains were those of the King brothers, Alastor and Lyle, fraternal twins who would have been thirty-eight years old on the following Sunday. But which body was which, whose charred organs, bones, blood had belonged to which brother, no forensic specalist would ever determine.

HELPING HANDS

1.

He came into her life when it had seemed to her that her life was finished.

He was not a volunteer at the charity thrift shop but an employee. You could see that he had no choice but to be working in this dismal place on this dismal November afternoon.

D
ISABLED
V
ETERANS
OF
N
EW
J
ERSEY
H
ELPING
H
ANDS
—
from the street the shop appeared to be little more than a storefront. She’d had a difficult time locating the weatherworn brown-brick building on South Falls Street, Trenton, amid a neighborhood that resembled a broken and part-disarticulated spine—small shuttered stores, pawnshops and taverns and rib shacks, vast rubble-strewn vacant lots as in the aftermath of a cataclysm.

This was Trenton, the capital city of New Jersey! Only a few blocks from the Mercer County Courthouse and the New Jersey State Courthouse and the gold-domed New Jersey State House overlooking the Delaware River.

The storefront window was layered in grime. On display were mismatched items of furniture, men’s clothing and boots. A faded poster depicting a pair of clasped hands beneath the words Helping Hands and a smiling crinkly-blue-eyed young soldier in a U.S. Army uniform regarding the onlooker with a look of disconcerting frankness—T
HANK YOU FOR ALL YOU CAN GIVE
! W
E WHO HAVE SERVED YOU ARE GRATEFUL
.

“Grateful!”—Helene felt the sting of irony. For the smiling soldier was disabled, presumably.

Or—was she imagining the scorpion-sting of irony, where none was intended?

Hesitantly she pushed open the heavy door half-expecting it to be locked, as the twilit interior seemed to suggest that Helping Hands wasn’t open.

In her arms she was carrying several plastic bags neatly tied shut and containing
gently used clothing
—(socks, underwear, T-shirts formerly her husband’s)—awkwardly managing to open the door and to wedge her way inside in the hopeful way of one who expects someone to witness her struggle, and the goodwill behind the struggle, and to hurry to help her.

He
took no notice of her, it seemed: the single figure at the rear of the shop, behind a counter and barely visible to her.

“Hello? Are you—open?”

With difficulty—for one of the several bundles had begun to slip from her embrace, and the strap of her heavy handbag was looped around her weakening wrist—Helene made her
way into the cluttered interior of the shop where at the rear, behind a waist-high counter, the clerk still hadn’t noticed her.

Helping Hands at 821 South Falls Street, Trenton, was both a thrift shop and a drop-off location for donations to the disabled veterans’ charity. It was a drafty, inhospitable place—more a storage warehouse than a shop. Overhead was a high ceiling of hammered tin, an ancient ceiling from which paint had peeled and flaked like leprous skin. The floor appeared to be bare floor-boards covered haphazardly with rug- and linoleum-remnants like jigsaw puzzle pieces that had worked their way apart. And the smell—dust, grime, something acidulous, gingery-medicinal mixed with the outer, gritty smoky-chemical air of Trenton—that stung her nostrils. What chagrin she felt to be bringing her husband’s intimate articles of clothing to this place that was a graveyard of unwanted things: sofas that looked as if, if beaten with a broom, they would explode in a fury of dust; lamps with stained and drunk-tilted shades; rolled-up carpets stacked against the wall like cast-aside bodies; bins of heaped shoes and boots as in those horrific photographs taken after the liberation of the Nazi death camps; a small platoon of (men’s) clothes sagging on wire hangers on gurney-like racks, like hunched figures in a soup kitchen line.

Behind the counter a radio was playing, turned low. Here was a comfortable if slovenly space someone had fashioned for himself, like an animal’s den. Here was a warm nimbus of light from a floor lamp, and in a sagging leather chair a man with a
dark-stubbled jaw and straggling dark hair was sprawled reading a book—Euripides’
Plays.

Belatedly—with a just-perceptible tinge of apology, unless it was annoyance—the stubble-jawed man glanced up.

“Ma’am! Let me help you.”

With a show of deferential haste he set the book down—facedown, not minding if the spine cracked—untwined himself from the leather chair without quite straightening up and scrambled around to the front of the counter. He moved—limped, lurched—as one with an artificial leg might move, pumping himself forward.

“Sorry! Didn’t see you come in, way back here.”

His smile was a quick flash baring small slightly uneven teeth and one dark space where a lower incisor was missing.

From the widow’s arms he took the neatly tied plastic bags. For surely his work at Helping Hands had made him practiced at identifying
widow, bereft woman. Alone.

With care the stubble-jawed man positioned her bags on a table as if their contents were likely to be novel, precious. Helene wanted to explain that she’d brought just small articles of clothing—she hadn’t yet confronted the task of going through her husband’s larger things—but her voice faltered and failed and at last she stood staring at the bags in a kind of abashed silence. Before the catastrophe in her life she’d been a woman who spoke easily to strangers, as to friends—now, her voice unaccountably faltered, often she seemed to lose the thread of what she was saying. And now she was fearful suddenly that her husband’s
things didn’t qualify as
gently used,
as the Helping Hands advertisement in the Mercer County yellow pages had requested—or weren’t clean; she was fearful that the stubble-jawed clerk would examine her donation and reject it.

But he spoke kindly, as if sensing her distress: “You can call Helping Hands, y’know. To arrange for a pickup at your residence.”

Residence
. Why did he not say
home.

Probably just quoting from the Helping Hands brochure yet it seemed to Helene significant, he’d avoided saying
home
.

She had no
home
now—only just a house she’d shared for more than twenty years with a man who had died.

“I—I wanted to save someone a drive. All the way out to . . .”

Her voice trailed off . Better not to say where she lived. For the suburban village contiguous with Princeton was so very different from Trenton, New Jersey, the very articulation of its name might strike an ironic note in this dreary place.

“That’s our job, ma’am. My job, mostly.”

Though his voice was grittily hoarse the clerk spoke cheerfully.

The smile flashed, and vanished.

Helene wondered: was the man a veteran?
Disabled?

He was older than he’d appeared at first glance. Probably he was thirty-five, at least. His right cheek was riddled and ridged with scar tissue and there were soft discolored indentations in his skin. His eyes were small, stone-colored, alert and alight. His hair was dark threaded with silver filaments and looked as if it had been roughly finger-combed, straggling over his collar like
a pelt. The stubbled jaws gave him a look of boyish aggression, playful swagger. You could see that he thought well of himself, in secret. Yet always he was deferential to the woman, eager to please as the light, restless eyes played over her.

He wore a rust-colored
faux-
suede sport coat too large for his narrow shoulders, a beige crewneck sweater with a stretched neck, “dress” gabardine trousers with cuff s that spilled onto the floor—mismatched articles of clothing surely appropriated from the Helping Hands rack a few yards away. And on his feet salt-stained hiking boots that reminded Helene of the hiking boots—better quality, in better condition—her husband had often worn when she’d first met him, nearly twenty-five years ago at the University of Minnesota.

“And it’s a nasty day. Especially in Trenton.”

Very lightly the word
Trenton
was accentuated, in irony.

He’d cast a sidelong glance at the widow’s face and sensed the precariousness of her emotions which resembled unstable rocks on a hillside—the slightest nudge, an avalanche.

“I—I wanted to see your headquarters. I was reading about Helping Hands and I thought . . .”

Thought? What had she
thought
? In the pain-wracked haze following an insomniac night leafing through the phone directory looking under
CHARITABLE ORGANIZATIONS
—
struck by the drawing of tight-clasped hands that had roused in her a sensation of envy, yearning, conviction.

Her husband would want his things given away, she knew. At his death he’d become a donor of body organs, eyes.

She would recall his laughter at her unease, when years before he’d signed the organ-donor form, in their lawyers’ office. Where they’d gone to make out their wills.

Helene had not wished to sign the form—just yet. And her husband had laughed at her, though not cruelly.

What will you do with your beautiful brown eyes, your kidneys, liver, heart in the afterlife?

She’d shuddered. He’d kissed her.

Laughter, in the innocence—ignorance?—of those long-ago days.

In fact she’d driven to Trenton because she’d been desperate to escape the house that she and her husband had so loved, and had lived in happily for so long—for not one room was safe for her, to glance into: when she did she saw the ghostly afterimage of her husband, seated in his chair in the living room, or at his desk in his study; it was terrible to enter their bedroom, and see—almost see—his figure in their bed, motionless beneath the covers as he’d been motionless in the hospital bed, when they’d summoned her to the hospital. . . .

And there was the sound of his footfall on the stairs, and his murmuring voice now indistinct and no longer playful as so often it had been playful, for all jokes cease with death.

Where am I, what has happened to me. . . . Helene!

She shuddered. So clearly she heard the terror in her husband’s voice.

“This isn’t our ‘headquarters,’ ma’am. There’s an office in Newark.” The stubble-jawed clerk was observing her closely.

“Yes? What? Oh yes. Newark.”

Her mind had gone blank.
Newark?

“Can I trouble you to please fill out this form? For our files.”

She was given a form, and a ballpoint pen. The stubble-jawed man cleared a space for her so that she could write.

Strange it seemed to her, the widow. To be in this place. But all places were strange to her now.

A faint rising wind, driving rain. That sensation of acute and indescribable unreality rising like dark water, to drown her.

She felt like an amputee uncertain which of her limbs has been severed.

“Ma’am? Sorry.”

The ballpoint pen—cheap, black plastic—stamped with a pair of tinselly clasped hands—had slipped from her fingers and clattered to the floor. With a muffled grunt—as if his back hurt him, or a stiff leg—the stubble-jawed man stooped to retrieve it for her.

“Thank you.”

She spoke softly. She felt tears sting her eyes. The slightest gesture of kindness was touching to her now. Lately it was happening, others were not so kind to her, or so patient—tapping their horns on the turnpike entrance ramp when she ventured too cautiously out into traffic, staring rudely at her in the post office when she blundered into the midst of a queue unaware of others who’d been waiting before her. At the Mercer County Courthouse where she’d held up the security checkpoint queue
when a bag in which she’d been carrying her husband’s
Last Will & Testament,
her husband’s death certificate and other documents had spilled onto the grimy floor.

Ma’am! Move along please!

Ma’am you maybe need some assistance? Somebody from home, to help you?

It was so, she could have used assistance. But she had not wanted assistance. She’d been stubborn, insisting she would go alone to Trenton. She was capable of executing the exhausting
death-duties
herself.

She dreaded pity! Even sympathy is a form of pity.

She dreaded the terrible intimacy of grief. She was a wounded creature preferring to crawl away, to nurse her pain, and not to share it with others.

No one can help me in what is essential. No one can come near.

At last she’d begun to sort through her husband’s things and to discard and to “donate”—to make available, to others in need, those things which her husband, deceased, would never again require. This was a ritual that needed to be done—(did it?)—and there was no one to do it except the widow.

How many had died, and their clothing brought to Helping Hands! There were racks of crammed-together clothes, bins of carelessly folded shirts, sweaters, pajamas. . . . Hard to believe that anyone, let alone
disabled veterans
, would be helped much by this graveyard of cast-off things.

At least, her husband’s clothing was in good condition. Some of the articles of clothing were new, or nearly new; most was of high quality. Some, little-worn. Some, still in dry cleaner’s bags. Helene had not brought those, that were too precious to be given away just yet.

After she’d emptied her husband’s bureau drawers of socks (neatly bunched together, in pairs), underwear, T-shirts, she’d stared into the empty drawers with a strange fixed smile like one about to plunge into an abyss. Thinking
But why? Why have I done this?
It seemed madness to her, to have emptied her husband’s things onto their bed, so that she would have to place them in bags, for the veterans’ charity; madness, to empty drawers that had not needed to be emptied.

She could not shake the conviction that, having signed the contract for her husband’s remains to be cremated, she had violated the deep, intimate bond between them: she had destroyed her husband’s body, for the sake of convenience.

Of course her husband had wanted to be
cremated
. Matter-of-fact and seemingly without sentiment like all of their friends, this had been his clearly stated wish.