The Fan-Shaped Destiny of William Seabrook (23 page)

There are interesting matters for you to explore among the histories of our progenitors. The information in the formal documents
attached will enable you to unearth that heritage. Such pursuits are something for which your mother, bless her heart, and
my niece who reared her have little use. They summarily dismiss anything they consider to be of the “dead past.” That has
come to give me a chuckle, the dead past; what an idea! The tip I can give is only that you not become
unduly
involved with
the minutiae of genealogy. The succession of historical personages who gave you your physical being is important, but not
paramount.

A score of years and more will have elapsed. High damned time, I would say, for your mother to have seen fit to divulge your
grandmother’s tragedy. My only child ended her brief life in sorrow, in illness, not long after she gave birth to your mother.
I was given to great deliberation by that catastrophe. Be mindful of how very wrong it is to belittle young love, its joys
and its sorrows. So many lives have been ruined. Should you ever feel yourself in like fashion loosely connected to this life,
remember me. I have lived long, thanks in large measure to always finding umpteen other things that needed doing.

Those days of the late Forties were a hellish time for a girl to bear a child out of wedlock. Her “shame” was visible to all
of a foolish society bent on turning back the clock to a time that had never been. Some died, by the butcher’s hand, most
in the living death of shotgun weddings. Public policy had become secret adoption, an illegal practice that should never have
been countenanced. At best a racket, at worst an abominable experiment, I would not have any of it in our family. Dreading
that the contingencies of my life may have had a detrimental effect on my poor child, though she had materially wanted for
nothing, I would not risk a re-enactment.

I arranged for my barren niece, together with her husband in Texas, to adopt and rear your mother. I would help from time
to time, but generally kept my thousand-mile distance. I might have erred; should have kept her with me. I hope that you will
not be put off when I express my certitude that your mother’s eventual marriage was a gross mistake. You may understand my
reasons by and by. I would hope, by the time you are of age, that union will have ended.

This practice, of passing on the name Justine, began as a little gesture of hope for the immortality of my lost daughter.
It was I who made it a part of your mother’s name and, as the tradition has not been observed with your sister, I am confident
that you will have become the latest Justine. For one thing, your mother will not jeopardize this bequest by failing to oblige
me.

Please do not misconstrue me. I love your mother dearly, but my niece proved out to be a little prig who reared a child tolerably
banal, so much as to eschew her birthright and her probable destiny. Though I pity her, all is not lost. The identity of your
grandfather is of no moment. The dimwit to whom your mother bound herself may or not turn out to be your sire. No matter,
the maternal line alone is important to us. I, myself, have had two marriages and various lovers. One alone will I trouble
to chronicle.

————————

In an early fall twilight, in the twilight of my life, my heart goes back, as I suppose it does with all women, to the very
first. Dark and brooding, brash, counterpoised, guilt haunted, even twisted, but so magnetic and powerful! Dear, dear Willie.
I suppose I would of always loved the bad boys; and not I alone. Also my darling Katie, who kept the years after Willie’s
passing from being unbearable. Even prissy little Marjorie, who would ask you to believe she was a damned saint, someway wading
through all of Willie’s queer leavings without getting any of them on her.

How Willie could make me hate him! Not for what I chose to endure willingly at his hands. I will stand by his affirmation
of my role in all that. I had better ought to censor myself here pursuant to my attorney’s advice. While it appears that a
broader ethic regarding personal beliefs and practices is in place, he cautions that, decades hence, prudish minds may yet
again dominate psychological definitions. As I said, a stodgy firm. No, I would hate Willie for the cavalier fashion in which
he treated the women who loved and adored him.

Only after he was gone, when I read the collection of notes from the barn experiments, was it impressed upon me what he had
believed himself about. So painful to embrace the solitary nightmare he had ridden all the years I had known him. I ask you
though, had he fully shared his secret with any of us, would we truly have believed him? Only after close study of his books
and letters could I no longer deny the bitter and yet wondrous truth. In all our incarnations, we are yet part of the human
condition. For all our wit, how often has the prayer gone up in contrition, in remorse; for one last chance, one more moment
to say I am sorry, or thank you, or even just good-bye?

Your true inheritance, my child, is that which he called
The Fan-Shaped Destiny
. Of imponderably greater value than the material
bequest, you must find the reasons that I have obliged you to come to Atlanta to collect it, and will send you farther yet
down time’s dark river. You are wondering, I will warrant, if something uncanny is not afoot. This is a deliberate puzzlement
for you to solve. Trace our lifelines, my child, and find yourself in the course of it. In this epistle, I will treat only
with singular moments of my enduring life with Willie Seabrook. With these missing pieces, you will find the rest for yourself.

If you have been told that I was the first Justine, you may be surprised to learn that I was not born with the name. It was
my dearest Willie who christened my sojourn in this life with the character of the divine Marquis. My birth name was Madeleine
and I was born around the turn of the century in New York City. Back in my day, ladies had the luxury of obscuring our exact
dates.

I well recall that first meeting, early in the year of 1917. I was working in the studio of Tony Sarg, the former German Army
officer who had decamped and eventually immigrated to the United States. His popular marionette theater brought him instant
celebrity in Greenwich Village. Ten years later, Tony would design the first giant balloons for the Macy’s Parade. Like my
Willie, he is not muchly remembered, either.

I was too young and green to understand Tony’s politics, though back in that day, most of the
avant-garde
were Socialists
of some denomination. In the studio girls’ eyes, he was well schooled in Prussian authoritarianism, but he had some kind of
conflict with the growing might of High Germany. One day he had attended a luncheon given by the proprietor of the Brevoort,
a man named Orteig, who was a sponsor of the Lafayette Escadrille and the Field Service. He had brought some of the returned
veterans back to show off the studio where we made the puppets.

Willie was then thirtyish, a tad older than his comrades. He cut a someway sinister appearance with his dark tousled hair
and mustache. He was big and brooding and scary-looking as he stalked about the studio with his shoulders hunched. He made
a splendid figure in his Field Service uniform, his
Croix de Guerre
on its red and green ribbon adding a Napoleonic touch.
Should history anymore be taught when you are educated, remember that the German ambassador had just then been expelled. It
was no longer the sophisticates alone who understood that American entry into the “War to End All Wars” was imminent. By then,
those early volunteers were cast as visionaries and heroes, to have tasted the horrors of war before being called.

Near the end of his life, he would hurt my feelings for a while by maintaining that I had made as little impression on him
as I had dreaded. I could not construe his claim that he had scarcely spoken to me, as I had so wanted to entice him in my
tiresome studio smock. After all, I would chide myself for months; this hero was married to the incredible Katie, who had
become a nurse to follow him off to war.

Her family was, reputedly, from big Southern money. I was but a callow dilettante, whereas she was a belle. My parents had
means sufficient to keep me comfortable, though they wished I would marry. With the changes being wrought by the Great War
in the offing, I could have become part of the new elite of educated professional ladies. I was more taken with the arts and
the bewitching characters who hung about with the likes of Tony Sarg.

Willie
had
talked with me and, to my bewilderment, flirted. He had then bowled me over with uncanny knowledge of my life and
personality. He knew how I so loved to wear weighty bracelets and chains and toc like that, back before “costume jewelry”
became fashionable. More dreadful was his hint that he knew what that affectation signified for me. Never, in all my enduring
life, had I told anyone about being “kidnapped” and tied to trees by the little boys, or how delightfully far those childhood
games had gone!

Willie wrote that he had dreamed about me and wanted to visit. When he taxed me with a harrowingly explicit vision of what
he wanted, there was positively no question about it. I went to meet him wearing so much leather and metal that climbing the
stairs, to the studio I had borrowed for our play, I must of looked a scream. Wishing that he would be less solemn about it
all, I did as best my shaking knees would allow to play the
blasee connaisseuse
of everything we were about to do. I soon
discovered that Willie was as nervous as I.

The rest is history. I was still floored that Katie had encouraged him in all that, when he then moved her up to New York
and did not leave for six years. Willie was my first love, my greatest love, and Katie became my best friend for life. As
mad as he could sometimes make me, I had sensed early on that my debt to the both of them was colossal.

————————

One of the exotic denizens of the Village who frequented Tony’s studio was the infamous Aleister Crowley, who billed himself
as a black magician and was suspected of being a German operative. Willie had early warned me against Crowley, which was passing
strange. For one thing, I was almost sure that had been before he had in fact met Crowley himself. Also, Willie was a Republican
and had no interest in the political charges against the man.

Moreover, after Frank Harris had introduced them over lunch at Mouquon’s, Willie had become quite taken with Crowley. Learning
that Crowley was reputed to employ sadistic rituals in his magic, I was absolutely sizzling when Willie refused to take me
around. As if
Mrs
. Seabrook did not socialize with Crowley? In truth, Katie was one of singularly few ladies that the “Great
Beast” seemed genuinely to respect. Everyone loved and respected Katie, not least of all myself.

Another peculiarity in this puzzlement was Jimmy, Willie’s friend from his newspaper days in Atlanta. Jimmy, a pious, bespectacled
man with thinning hair, would have looked right at home, as Damon Runyon described him, passing the collection plate in a
Baptist congregation. Destined to head a national news syndicate, Jimmy wanted only to be regarded as a good reporter. He
and Willie, the flamboyant bad boy, made quite an odd pair. They would always be friends, even after Jimmy published a weird
little book based obviously on Willie. The scandal sheets, in the know as to the personalities, found it juicy and near enough
to libelous for their tastes.

That book would later magnify my unease concerning the entire Crowley matter, but I enjoyed it, in large measure because Marjorie
hated it. When I first met Jimmy during an autumn visit to the City, he watched me so queerly, as though here was
another
man who knew absolutely everything about me. He inveighed against Crowley, but only piqued my shameless, catlike curiosity
with his urging that I observe Willie’s cautions.

I was young and impetuous; even my worship of Willie would side-track me for only so long. At a venture, I pestered Sarg for
an introduction. Finally, in the late summer of 1918, Tony’s own nefarious purposes were served by recommending me as a “companion”
to A.C., as we called Crowley, on a river trip up the Hudson. I up and went! We started upriver from Hyde Park, in a damned
canoe
of all things. Before long, it began to turn into one of those hideously uncomfortable, insect infested, out-of-doors
“experiences.” Moreover, I found A.C. a pompous ass and physically repellent. At length, my crawling skin reduced me to spinning
tales and throwing tantrums like the petulant child I probably was. I succeeded in making myself tedious enough for him to
send me home.

On my way back down to the City, I was desolate enough, without having to suffer a growing terror that felt akin to
deja vu.
Passing through Dutchess County, I began to wonder if the Catskills really were haunted; or what if Crowley really and truly
was a magician and did something unmentionable? Glimpsing the lights of the River mansions near Rhinebeck in the twilight,
I was overcome with the most horrid foreboding. What if I lost him, what if I lost Willie? For no apparent reason, I was squalling
up a storm. The River, twisting into its Stygian darkness, seemed bound for a hell of wailing loneliness. Then it was that
I made a crucial decision.

Willie, who had something to do with financing A.C.’s excursion, was most put out. Coming from Willie, I was shocked to find
him so beside himself. Persuaded how repulsive I had found A.C., he relaxed only a tad. While I idolized him and was therefore
biased, I positively could not construe why he would remain so touchious. Katie had become a star of Village life, planning
to open up a smart coffeehouse. She held me forth as her
protegee
and A.C. never would of dared antagonize her. Try as I might,
he would not be gainsaid and, when he did slacken, it was the strangest thing.

He never broached the subject to A.C., but I was not tempted to regard that as weakness or hypocrisy. I think he fathomed
A.C. as the sort of dog who would only be encouraged by marked territory. The Seabrooks socialized with A.C. till he left
the country the following year, but I had no desire ever again to go near him. Whatever had occasioned all that hellblackness
in the Catskills, I would do nothing that might invite the dreadful thing to return. Some months after the river trip, A.C.
invited Willie to his rooms on Washington Square. Willie met and, I would presume, played with A.C.’s new
protegee,
a woman
called Leah, who became a fixture of A.C.’s career. Willie would later write of A.C. and Leah with awe and intrigue, but what
I remember is this: