The Drowning Girl

9

There is a very famous poem by Matthew Arnold (1822–1888), “Dover Beach,” that has always been a favorite of mine. I’ve read it aloud to myself many times, delighting in the interplay of words and metaphor. But, until this past week, it has never assumed a personal meaning for me. My own private meaning. It’s only ever been pretty words written in a time when all the world was a different and rapidly changing place:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

I’ve beheld the Sea of Faith, and now I’m left with no choice but to listen closely to the melancholy, long withdrawing roar, which is a siren’s song on a fogbound night when waves pummel the naked shingles of the world.

Imp typed, “I’m free of the phantoms of Perrault and the Black Dahlia and the wolf who cried girl and the November Eva who never was and never came to me. I have locked them inside a story from which they can never escape to do me harm. I’ve exorcised them.”

But I’m not unhaunted. I’ve already written on the permanence of haunting. I wrote, “Once Odysseus heard the sirens, I find it hard to believe he ever could have forgotten their song. He would have always been haunted by it all the rest of his life.”

However, now I think I have crossed a threshold where my ghost story has ceased to be malicious twins. Now it wears a single face.

Imp typed, “This may, at least, make my ghost story, in some sense, comprehensible.”

I have placed one Eva behind me. I have only July, and Caroline and Rosemary, and The Drowning Girl and Phillip George Saltonstall, “The Little Mermaid” and the Siren of Millville. That’s quite enough ghosts for one madwoman.

All is changed utterly, the gyre still widens here in my night of first ages, and, in the end, I am left with a terrible beauty and a slouching beast. The monster is neither shackled nor is she conquered, and I gaze on her monstrous and free. And this, too, as my head races with Matthew Arnold, Yeats, Conrad, races and tangles, all wanting out at once. All wanting to be done writing of July Eva and my mermaid ghost story:

It’s been a strange day, but I’m going to try hard to relate it coherently, resorting to the sort of linear narrative that has so often now eluded me. I don’t think in straight lines, neat number lines (0–9,-9–0), once upon a time and happily ever after, A–Z, whatever. But I’m going to try hard this time.

I spent the morning putting in applications at places that weren’t hiring, but would be sooner or later. Bill gave me a good reference, and that surprised me, right? Sure, sure it did. But he said he understood it wasn’t my fault, and he would hire me back if not for the owner, and he didn’t want to see me long unemployed. I filled out applications at Utrecht on Wickenden Street, some other shops on Wickenden, shops on Thayer, at Wayland Square (including the Edge, though I know not one jot about being a barista). Ellen told me I should apply at Cellar Stories, so I did. I would love to work there. I would, though it seems unlikely. Altogether, I filled out fifteen applications. Maybe I’ll be called back for an interview or two.

Abalyn and I arranged to meet at four o’clock p.m. downstairs at the Athenaeum. She said there was something she wanted to look up, which seemed strange to me, as she rarely seems to read anything but her digest-sized volumes of manga (which I confess make no sense to me, and always seemed very silly when I’ve tried to read them). She was seated at one of the long tables across from the tall portrait of George Washington. Her laptop was out and on, and she had her iPod and iPhone. She wasn’t using any of them, but I suspect, for her, they’re like Linus van Pelt’s security blanket. Talismans against the unfriendly, intolerant, misunderstanding world. But she was reading a book. Not a very old book, and she closed it when I spoke to her. She closed it and looked up at me. The cellophane library cover glistened in the sunlight from the windows.

“Any luck with the job hunting?” she asked, and rubbed at her eyes.

“I don’t know yet. Maybe. Probably not.”

I sat down in the chair beside her and dropped my bag to the floor, one of Rosemary Anne’s old shapeless bags. This one was pea-green corduroy.

“What about you? Did you find whatever it was you were looking for?”

She stared at the cover of the book a moment. It wasn’t a very old book, and the cover read The Lemming Cult: The Rise and Fall of the Open Door of Night by William L. West. There was a PhD after the author’s name. I turned away and stared at the shelves, instead. Being faced suddenly, unexpectedly, with this book, this particular book, Abalyn’s discovery, I felt like I’d come suddenly upon a gruesome accident. No, that’s not right. But I don’t want to waste time finding a better analogy.

“I won’t tell you, if you don’t want to hear.”

“I don’t,” I replied, still staring towards a shelf of plays and books on theater. “But what I don’t know is worse than what I do.” The unknown thing under the water, devouring and unseen, versus the banal danger of a hunted great white shark (Carcharodon carcharias, Smith, 1838; Greek, karcharos, meaning jagged, and odous, meaning tooth; kar-KAR-uh-don kar-KAR-ee-us).

“You’re sure?”

“Please,” I said, and maybe I whispered. But, in the library, my voice seemed very loud (even though, as I’ve noted, it can be a very noisy library).

I heard Abalyn open the book, but I didn’t turn back to her. I stared at the tattered spines of antique editions and listened while she quietly read from Chapter 4:

“ ‘One of the more visible outspoken members of the cult was Eva Canning, a native of Newport, Rhode Island. Canning arrived in California in the late summer of 1981, having received a scholarship to attend UC Berkeley. As an undergraduate, she developed a strong interest in Mediterranean archaeology, and received her BS in anthropology in June 1985, afterwards remaining at Berkeley to work towards a PhD in sociocultural archaeology. During this time, she did fieldwork in Greece, Turkey, and on several Aegean islands. However, one of her two coadvisers was Jacova Angevine, and when Angevine left the university in ’eighty-eight, so did Canning. There are unsubstantiated rumors that the two had become lovers. Regardless, Canning would soon become one of Angevine’s most trusted confidantes, and interviews with surviving members reveal that she was one of four women accorded the rank of High Priestess of the Open Door of Night. During the ceremonies at the Pierce Street temple in Monterey, Canning is said always to have been in attendance, and to have been among those responsible for the induction of new members.

Many journalists have extended Canning’s role in the cult’s swift rise to prominence beyond recruitment. It’s readily evident that it was through Canning’s promotional efforts and acumen that the ODoN attracted so many so quickly. She not only took advantage of the nascent internet but spread the cult’s doctrine via college campuses, the underground zine culture of the late eighties and early nineties, and numerous mentions appear in Factsheet Five from 1988 onwards. During this period, articles on ODoN, and two interviews with Canning, appear in zines in the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and Japan (for a summation, see Karaflogka, Anastasia, “Occult Discourse and the Efficacy of Zines,” Religion 32 [2002]: 279–91). Following the events at Moss Landing, her suicide note (one of only four left behind) was printed in many of these homegrown publications.

While at Berkeley, Canning also arranged for the creation of the Usenet group alt.humanities.odon, which saw considerable traffic from 1988 to 1991. One can only imagine how much more damage Canning might have managed if she’d had the World Wide Web at her disposal.’ ”

Abalyn paused, and I didn’t say anything for a moment. I say “a moment,” but I don’t know how long. And then I asked her, “Is that all?”

“No. That’s not even the most important part. Do you want me to go on?”

“I do,” I replied. “I want you to go on. You’ve begun this. You can’t very well stop now.”

And so she read a little more from Chapter 4:

“ ‘Before Eva Canning departed New England for California, she gave birth to an illegitimate daughter. The child was adopted by Canning’s mother and father. I have chosen to omit her name here, as she’s already suffered much unwanted and hurtful attention in connection to her mother’s involvement with Jacova Angevine.’ ”

Abalyn stopped, and I could hear her turning a page or two. Then she read, “ ‘Eva Canning’s body was sent back East, and her badly mutilated and decomposed remains were duly cremated. Her ashes were strewn in the sea from high cliffs at the eastern edge of Aquidneck Island, near Salve Regina College, her mother’s alma mater. However, there was also a modest memorial service at Middletown Cemetery in Newport. A headstone in the Canning family plot marks an empty grave.’ ”

Again, silence. I could hear footsteps overhead, and the voices of patrons and librarians. I glanced towards the staircase leading to the ground floor, polished oak and worn red carpeting.

“I want to go there,” I said. “I need to go there, Abalyn. I have to see her grave for myself.”

“It’s too late to go today.”

“Then we’ll go tomorrow.”

I don’t have a membership to the Athenaeum, because I can’t afford one. But I had several pages of The Lemming Cult: The Rise and Fall of the Open Door of Night by William L. West (New York: The Overlook Press, 1994) photocopied, so I’d have them for later, because of what Rosemary Anne said about remembering significant things.

As we left the library and stepped back out into the cold November evening, Abalyn asked if I was all right, and I lied and told her I was fine. “We need to stop by the market on the way home,” I added.

And the next day, it snowed, and the next day, we went to Newport. Bah. Dah. Ba-ba.

Obituary from the Newport Daily News (April 11, 1991):

Age 30, of Lighthouse Avenue, Monterey, CA, drowned on April 4 at Moss Landing State Beach, Moss Landing, CA.

Born in Newport, RI, on October 30, 1960, she was the daughter of Isadora (Snow) and the late Ellwood Arthur Canning.

Miss Canning received a bachelor of science in anthropology in June 1985 from the University of California, Berkeley.

Eva was working on a graduate degree in archaeology at the time of her death. She was widely traveled, especially in the eastern Mediterranean, and published several notable papers in prominent scientific journals. As a young girl, she had a passion for poetry, collecting seashells, and bird-watching.

She is survived by her daughter, E. L. Canning, and by her mother, and several aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Her funeral will be held on Monday, April 13, 1991, at 11 a.m. at the Memorial Funeral Home, 375 Broadway, Newport, with a funeral service at 12 p.m. in St. Spyridon’s Greek Orthodox Church, Thames Street, Newport. Burial will be in Middletown Cemetery in Middletown.

Memorial donations may be made to St. Spyridon’s Greek Orthodox Church, Endowment Fund, PO Box 427, Newport, RI 02840.

Eva Canning had a daughter. A daughter whose first initial is E. Why is her full name not given here? Anonymity, an effort to protect her from Eva’s Open Door of Night connections and subsequent scandal? And who was the father? The daughter would have had to be born…when, while Eva was still in high school? Was the daughter raised by Eva’s mother? Too many questions, and my head spins and lists with them. Abalyn found this obituary yesterday, and I have added it to my file labeled “Perishable Shippen; Eva Canning.”

To say today has been unsettling doesn’t do it justice by half. And, here, Imp types, “You’ve had stranger. Far stranger, India Morgan Phelps.” And yes, I have. But it was strange, still, and unsettling. That’s the word that keeps coming back to me. Unsettling. Doors have swung open, and doors have slammed shut. Truths (or, rather, facts) I had half convinced myself of have been cast into doubt all over again. One step backwards, as Caroline might have said.

Abalyn didn’t want me to go, never mind she was the one who set this in motion by showing me that book and the obituary. “What good can possibly come of it?” she asked. “Whatever there is to know is here, right here in the obit.” Then she pointed out that the toll across the Newport Bridge would be four dollars each way, going and coming back, and, still being unemployed, I shouldn’t be throwing money away like that.

“I’ll go alone,” I told her. “If you won’t go with me, I’m not afraid to go by myself. It’s something I need to see, and I mean to go.” I was standing at the window, looking down at Willow Street. Have I mentioned it snowed last night? No, I haven’t. I was standing at the window looking down at the two inches or so of an early snowfall that had fallen the night before. The snowplow had just rumbled down the street, heaping mounds to either side, half-burying the sidewalks. The end of the drive was blocked now, and I’d have to shovel it before I could get the Honda out. I hate shoveling snow.

“India, it’s already two o’clock,” she said.

“That’s not so late,” I replied. “The roads should be clear, and I don’t care what time it is.”

She asked me to please at least call Dr. Ogilvy and tell her, and ask if she thought going to the cemetery was a bad idea. Abalyn said she’d go with me, if I called my psychiatrist and if Dr. Ogilvy didn’t disapprove.

“She said I should find my own answers,” I said. “She said I have to find my own answers. Dr. Ogilvy isn’t my babysitter. She isn’t my mother. I don’t need her permission. I’m a grown woman.”

“You are a fragile woman,” Imp typed. “How long now since you cowered naked and filthy and delirious in a corner of your bedroom, raving about the wolf who cried girl on a snowy night in Connecticut?”

“Please,” Abalyn pleaded. And after all she’d done for me, and all she’d lost on my account, I really couldn’t tell her no. It’s not as if her request were truly unreasonable. It’s not like I could pretend it was.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll call. But whatever she says, I’m going anyway.”

“Just call her,” Abalyn said. So, I called Dr. Ogilvy. I got lucky, and she had a few minutes between patients, so I didn’t have to leave a message with the receptionist and wait around for her to call me back, which would have meant losing more daylight (and I will admit I didn’t want to go to the graveyard after sunset; I don’t like graveyards, and this one, I knew, was going to be lots worse than usual).

Dr. Ogilvy asked if I thought I was up to it. I told her yes, and she told me to go. She agreed it would be a good idea for Abalyn to accompany me. Abalyn grimaced at the news, but she’d been the one who struck the deal, and she didn’t argue.

I drove. I drove slowly and carefully because of the snow. Abalyn smoked and blew smoke out her window, which she’d rolled down just a crack. We left Providence about three, left the city, and crossed the West Passage of the Narragansett Bay on the Jamestown Bridge. The water before us shimmered, blinding, in the sun, like mercury spilled on blue-gray slate. We crossed Conanicut Island, then up and over the Newport Bridge, with its pale green cables and guardrails, its two white lancet towers, the slate-and-mercury waters of the East Passage four hundred feet below us. I thought about seals, whales, sharks, how the bay had once been a series of river valleys that flooded fifteen thousand years ago when glaciers melted. Mostly, I tried not to think about what we’d find at the cemetery. We saw a bumper sticker on a car in front of us that read “A thesaurus is NOT a giant lizard.” I laughed, but Abalyn didn’t.

And then we were on Aquidneck Island. I skirted Newport, following the directions Abalyn had gotten from MapQuest. We took Miantonomi Avenue and Green End Avenue east to the intersection with Turner Road, and here I turned left, turned north. I passed homes and a nursery with dozens of low greenhouses. I also passed tennis courts, basketball courts, and a track field mostly buried beneath the snow. Then we’d reached the place where Turner intersects with Wyatt Road. The cemetery lay at the northeast corner of the crossroads, and I thought, they used to bury suicides at crossroads. The obituary gave the graveyard’s name as Middletown Cemetery, but an incongruously cheerful blue and gold sign at the entrance called it Four Corners Cemetery.

Abalyn glared at the cemetery, and she said, “This is so fucking dumb. It’s pointless, Imp.” I didn’t answer her.

And then this really happened. Abalyn was right there to see it. Just as we turned off Turner into the graveyard, a huge crow alighted on a headstone only a few feet from the driver’s-side door. All those years ago, Caroline said, “If you’re listening to a story, and a crow shows up like that, you can bet the storyteller is making the whole thing up.” I didn’t tell Abalyn what crows mean, and, truthfully, in this context, I do not know. But it really did happen.

The snow hadn’t fallen as heavily on Aquidneck Island as in Providence, but the narrow chip-and-tar roads in the cemetery hadn’t been cleared, so I had to drive very slowly. I knew how to find Eva Canning’s grave, because I’d had Abalyn check a couple of genealogy websites before we left. She’d even found a diagram of the graveyard. Eva’s grave was all the way back at the northern edge, where a low fieldstone wall separated the cemetery from a vineyard, gone brown with the season. The same fieldstone wall enclosed the entire graveyard.

Rhode Island has many picturesque, photogenic cemeteries. Four Corners isn’t one of them. There are no trees, and most of the stones are the same weathered limestone and marble, few dating back before the late nineteenth century. I parked next to a huge mausoleum sort of thing. It was hardly more than an artificial hill, dirt heaped over a vacuity and fronted with granite blocks and a rusty iron door. There were patches of hay and dead turf on it, as though the caretakers were trying to get grass to grow. It was an ugly thing, and put me in mind of fairies, hollow hills, barrow dens, Tolkien, Mary Stewart. I switched off the car and looked at Abalyn.

“You don’t have to get out,” I said.

All she said was, “Yes, Imp, I do.”

So we did. We both got out of the Honda. I stood by the car a moment, surveying the bleak cemetery. I glanced up at the sky, so blue and cloudless, so pale blue it was almost white, a wide carnivorous sky, as Rosemary Anne would have said. It wasn’t anyplace I wanted to stay very long, and twilight wasn’t far off. The shadows cast by the headstones were growing long. Abalyn lit another cigarette, and the cold wind took the smoke apart.

“Let’s get this over with,” she said.

It wasn’t hard to find Abalyn Canning’s marker. It was on the left (to the west) of the mausoleum barrow-den hill. It was set about twenty-five feet back from the road, surrounded by monuments bearing names like Cappucilli, Bowler, Hoxslii, Greer, Ashcroft, Haywood, Church, and, of course, other Cannings. It was a modest headstone carved from a brick-red granite, which distinguished it from its tiresome rows of gray-white neighbors. There was a garland of ivy carved at each upper corner. I read aloud what was written there, and then sat down on the snowy ground, already going spongy as the snow melted beneath that bright November sun.

“Fuck,” Abalyn said, and she didn’t say anything else until after we’d gotten back into the car. This is what was graven into the stone (I wrote it down, precisely):

I said, “They were thirty years old when they died. They were both thirty. They were both Eva Canning.” And Abalyn smoked her cigarette and said nothing at all. I read the epitaph aloud, “They that go down to the sea.” And I heard a crow caw-cawing loudly somewhere very nearby. I’m not making that up, either. This is all as factual as it is true. “I don’t know what it means,” I said, and I sat on the soggy ground and cried for a while. My tears were like ice on my cheeks. Finally, Abalyn helped me up and led me back to the Honda. When we were safe inside, and I was behind the wheel, she asked, belatedly, if I was okay to drive. I told her yes. Yes, I can drive. I just want to be away from here. I just want to be far, far away from here and never, ever come back. I heard the crow again. Dusk was coming on fast.

“Then let’s get moving,” Abalyn said. “We can figure this shit out later. Here isn’t the place to try.”

I turned the key in the ignition. I retraced the path home: Turner to Green End to Miantonomi Avenue to the Newport Bridge, the East Passage, Conanicut Island, Jamestown, the West Passage, the Jamestown Bridge, Route 4 to I-95 back to Providence and the Armory and Willow Street.

But this I know. I made a list for Dr. Ogilvy, and the eighth item—“There was only one Eva Canning”—was a lie I’d told without meaning to. It was a mistaken epiphany that somehow has turned out wrong. I wrote seven truths that afternoon, not eight. Seven (7).

After dragging Abalyn off to the Middletown Cemetery (or Four Corners Cemetery), I wanted—no, needed—to give her something in return for that indulgence. And I gave her a secret, a secret so secret it scared me to admit it to myself, much less share it with another human being. Even with a woman whom I’d loved and still loved. This is the night after we go to Aquidneck Island, and after a dinner of bow-tie pasta with pesto and a green salad with vinaigrette dressing. It all tastes like paste to me. I ask her to come to the room where I paint, my studio. She looks uncertain at first. On the qui vive, as Caroline would have said.

“It will only take a few minutes,” I said. “There’s something I need you to see.”

“Need or want?” she asks, and wipes at her mouth with a paper toll towel (I’ve never owned cloth napkins).

“Need,” I reply, so she shrugs and nods and follows me to the room where I paint. I switch on the light. I say, “You didn’t have to go with me today. You’ve been doing a lot of stuff you don’t have to do.”

“Imp, you don’t owe me anything.”

“It won’t take but a moment,” I tell her, deciding not to argue about the validity of unpaid debts. And then I went to an old wardrobe (found by the road, and I think it’s from the 1920s, banged-up Art Nouveau, a cheap knockoff of something much more expensive).

“You don’t need to do this again,” she says, starting to sound exasperated, maybe at the borderlands of surly.

I don’t say anything. I turn the small brass key that is always in the wardrobe’s lock and open both doors. Inside are very many canvases, some stretched and stapled to wooden frames, others rolled and stacked like papyrus scrolls. The wardrobe breathes out the aromas of dust, oil paint, and cedar. I pull out the canvas nearest the front (one of the stretched, stapled ones) and hand it to Abalyn. She holds it a moment, staring down at the painting, then up at me, then back at the painting. I take another from the wardrobe, then another, and another, and another, until a dozen or more are scattered about on the floor or leaned against the walls.

“You did all these?” Abalyn asks, sounding like she won’t believe me if I say I id did; I nod, not especially caring if she believes me or not. No, I do care. But I want not to care.

“ ‘The Mermaid of the Concrete Sea Ocean,’ ” she says. “The crippled woman and the painter…,” and trails off.

“I did these after I wrote the story.”

“And after Eva,” she almost whispers, and I say yes, after Eva Canning.

“I’m sorry,” Abalyn says, and laughs a dry, hollow laugh. “I’m just a little freaked-out right now. You made up these paintings, that obsessed artist’s paintings, and then, after Eva came, you actually painted his paintings?”

I nod, then sit down on the floor, holding the wardrobe key, and Abalyn (still holding the first canvas I took out) sits down in front of me.

“What happened with Eva, that inspired these?”

“Yeah, and the story I’d written. Before Eva came, I’d read a book about the shark that swam up Matawan Creek in New Jersey in 1916 and attacked three swimmers in the creek, miles and miles from the sea. Two of them died.”

“That made you write a story about mermaids?”

“And what the painter found washed up at Atlantic City, and…” And I stop, because I don’t think I can explain so that Abalyn will ever understand, and, besides, it’s suddenly all sort of muddled together in my head. The chronology, I mean.

Abalyn’s still holding the painting, my favorite of the lot—though part of me loathes them all—Regarding the Shore from Whale Reef. The painting hanging on the old woman’s wall in the story. As I have written before, the mermaid has her back to the viewer. Buoyed by rough waves, she holds her arms outstretched to either side, her long hair floating around her like a dense tangle of kelp, and she gazes towards land and a whitewashed lighthouse perched on a granite promontory. It’s the rugged slate and phyllite shore off Beavertail Point on Conanicut Island. I paid a fisherman twenty dollars to carry me out far enough for reference photos (and I got seasick). Also, I changed the name of Whale Rock to Whale Reef. I can’t remember why.

In my short story, I wrote: “The viewer might be fooled into thinking this is only a painting of a woman swimming in the sea, as so little of her is showing above the waterline. She might be mistaken for a suicide, taking a final glimpse of the rugged strand before slipping below the surface. But, if one looks only a little closer, the patches of red-orange scales flecking her arms are unmistakable, and there are living creatures caught up in the snarls of her black hair: tiny crabs and brittle stars, the twisting shapes of strange oceanic worms and a gasping, wide-eyed fish of some sort, suffocating in the air.”

“I thought maybe it would help,” I say. Out on the street, a car horn honks three times. “Like you and Dr. Ogilvy thought writing ‘Werewolf Smile’ might help me.”

“But…,” Abalyn started, then was silent for a second or two. “But that was one story. There must be, what? Thirty or forty of these?”

“Forty-seven,” I say, “and a couple of sketch pads of studies I did beforehand. Sometimes, I’ve thought I should make a big pile in the backyard and burn them all. I’ve thought I should make a pyre. Maybe that would provide the catharsis painting them didn’t.” (Isn’t that what Saltonstall did? And what did he really burn?)

“Forty-seven,” Abalyn says, and laughs again, like she thinks I’m making the number up. Incredulous.

“You can count them if you want,” I tell her.

“Imp, don’t ever burn these. I don’t care why you painted them. I don’t care if that crazy bitch was in back of it.” Her eyes wander across all those paintings; then she stares hard at me. “Just don’t ever burn these. They’re beautiful.”

I don’t make any promises. We sit there a long time, together and apart. I’ve seen people in love with art, and I think I’m watching Abalyn fall in love with my mermaid. It makes me want to burn them all the more.

Now, I have to tell the part of my ghost story about the mermaid, what happened after I tried to drown myself in the tub and Abalyn Armitage saved me and left me. I have to tell about the day that Eva Canning, the daughter of Eva Canning, came back for me, that day and all the days that followed, and how it ended.