“Fuck yourself.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” said Irv. “Whatever else has happened, your inhibitions as to language have been admirably loosened. Not quite Tourette’s syndrome. More like Tourette’s Lite. Shall I go on?”
She nodded, chagrined but eager.
“Gervase. Gervasa I mean. Of Normandy, let’s say, or somewhere in northern France. She mentioned the Abbot of Saint- Evroult and the diocesan kingdom, if you will, of Lisieux, and I think Cluny came into it somewhere too.”
Winnie sat up more strictly, trying to pay the hardest attention she could; she wasn’t sure if Gervasa was sitting up, too, seeing whether Irv would get it right.
“There was something about a fire, and a lost baby.”
Winnie slumped. She didn’t want this story. There was no fire, there was not even any ghostly possession, just the same old nightmare reinventing itself in new garb at every turn.
“No fire,” she said, but then Gervasa said Fire! and it seemed as if Winnie’s skin began to shrink and pucker. She clutched herself.
“Shall I stop?” said Irv, looking at some monitor.
“Not yet,” she managed, before Gervasa broke in excitedly. Irv waited with politeness, and though Winnie waved her hands he didn’t catch her message: Speak over the rabble, will you, while I’m awake. Only when Gervasa’s recitation faltered again did Irv say, “There was an indictment by some tribunal, probably a clerical magistrate of some sort, against—uh, let’s call the narrator Gervasa then. As you like. Something like an excommunication, we’d guess.”
We? Meaning exactly you and who else? thought Winnie with a shred of jealousy, but then managed to say to herself, Who am I to be sniffy about plurals? Who are we?
“Anyway, Gervasa was implicated. I can’t figure it out,” said Irv. “According to the story that Mrs. Maddingly told, the G character was—well, I should add this is rather horrible—was burned alive.”
“When?”
“Gervasa doesn’t give dates. I was hoping that you, the practicing novelist, might have some idea. Just for the sake of narrative satisfaction, mind you.”
Winnie didn’t know if she was being asked to channel the deposition of a ghost or to write fiction on the spot. She winced. Gervasa thought no clear answer in her mind, only spewed forth useless syllables.
Maybe useless. They were being caught, anyway, on the tape.
A huge scowling cresty-haired sister came whisking in. “The monitors signaled spiking levels; severe rest is required,” said the matron. Winnie wasn’t sure that was the most legitimate use of the word severe, but she didn’t care. Severe rest was what she needed, already. She was asleep before Irv Hausserman could be given the bum’s rush by Sister Teutonia.
The doctors came and gabbled in med-speak. They made less sense than the noisy objections of Gervasa, who seemed to take umbrage at their examinations. But though Winnie could sense her mind seizing up on her from time to time, the tenancy of a Gervasa de Normandie within her apparently wasn’t detectable by the doctors. Winnie’s muscles and willpower remained her own, as far as she could tell. Gervasa was quiescent, did not flinch or flare up. Even the use of the muscles of the mouth to vocalize Gervasa’s chortles and chirps seemed somehow voluntary, a shared effort. Winnie could claim not to be hijacked, but a partner.
Winnie wasn’t able to glean what the doctors were diagnosing, if anything, but though they came regularly, they left just as regularly.
Winnie was beginning to think of Gervasa as her inner ghoul, half tomcat, half tomboy.
It seemed a little less hard to pay attention every additional time she was awake, except that it was hard to tell the time.
It was laughable, even slightly mortifying, to imagine being possessed by something so improbable, so foreign—a thirteenth-century peasant martyred at the stake? Puh-lease. But then perhaps not as surprising as all that. Every sane soul, thinking “Curiouser and curiouser!” as she observes her own life, secretes a sort of chitinous shell around her own vulnerable keep. One presumably builds up resistance against more garden-variety infections and viruses. Over the deaths of her own parents, for instance, Winnie had not languished longer than propriety required. Sure, she had run through the usual catalog of residual effects—fond memories, resentments, unanswerable puzzlements—but a haunting by either of the Rudges, those gentle, slow-release Acts of God? It would be like being haunted by air or light—only a genius could manage even to notice such a thing.
For a ghost to take hold, perhaps it had to rely on the strategies of surprise or disguise, of nonsense even. A ghost had to be devious to slip past the phagocytes of the psyche that repel the more obvious invaders.
Winnie was awake, and talking to herself. She asked Gervasa questions in English, out loud, and Gervasa answered in what sounded like toddler patois. The tenant within managed to lapse into a sociable silence when John Comestor and Allegra Lowe came by, with a bouquet of lilies and hothouse snapdragons wrapped in a crinkly acetate. Winnie was beginning to realize that if she didn’t open her mouth to speak any English, she could sometimes prevent Gervasa from yakking for attention.
John and Allegra, hmmm, thought Winnie. Suppose that Allegra was only lying when she said she’d taken up with Malcolm Rice? But that was too tedious a path to follow. So what? What difference did it make even if she were? Gervasa was half the story now, and Gervasa didn’t know John and Allegra from Adam and Eve.
“I had a devil of a time getting DHL to release this packet to me,” said John, brandishing an overnight mail parcel. “I had to get the doctor to write that you were in seclusion for your health before the delivery service would let it out of their hands. Shall I open it?”
She wanted the heft and stress of a pull tab to jerk, cardboard to rip, but when she saw that it was several photocopied pages, she remembered her request of that fellow in Brookline.
There was a brief note. It began, “Dear Winnie—The fourth grade is having a W. Rudge Read-a-thon in honor of a visit we hope you’ll make to us—” She put the note aside.
She couldn’t read the photocopied text aloud for fear of Gervasa’s interruption. She handed the thing to John and motioned to him: Read.
He recognized it at once. “This old stuff? Are you sure?”
She nodded. It had been a long time since she had looked at any of it.
“All of it?”
She managed to squeak, “Start,” while Gervasa was having a think about something else.
John shrugged. “As you wish.
“Haverhill, Kent, August twelfth, ’71.
“To my Dear Niece Dorothea from your Uncle.
“I endeavour to keep my promise to you today and pick up my pen to correct your mistaken notions of my father and your grandfather, the late Ozias Rudge. Since the death last year of Mr Dickens I have heard little but nonsense spoken about our good and decent forebear. To the silliness spoken at Miss Bairnfeather’s table on Saturday last I take the most extreme objection.
“There can be no doubt as you so engagingly related that your grandfather claimed nothing less than a ghostly visitation. His memories of such were often recounted in contradictory renditions depending on whether there were ladies present clergy et cet.”
John said, “Rather a failure as a prose stylist, our many-times-great-grandfather. Dry stuff. You could have a relapse.” She made a motion: Go on. She thought, Better get what I can while Gervasa is quiescent.
He ran his finger along the paper, squinting at the long flattened loops of the handwriting.
“Being sensitive and suggestible as the gentler sex must to their sorrow be, by rights you ought to be spared the details that surround the stories of your grandfather. But I am gravely discomforted by hearing you sport with your family’s history and gabble such a confloption as turns your dear grandfather into a rustic fool.”
“What a lead-up,” said Allegra, who had been pretending not to listen.
“Well, here comes the go
od cheese. Here’s Ozias’s son lecturing poor Dorothea. As they say, the next voice you hear is Edward Rudge’s.
“Quote.
“Ozias Rudge claimed to have engaged the young Master Dickens with a tale of hauntings said to have taken place in Rudge House, in the very darkest days of December, nearly fifty years ago—’24 I think it was, or ’25. Having overseen a mining enterprise until a pit collapse cost a grievous loss of life, your grandfather fell into low spirits. Past the springtime of his life, he repaired to Hampstead to take the healthful airs. His new work supplied him with connexions on the Continent and it was long supposed by his widow your grandmother Cornelia that he turned his gaze abroad to escape sad memories of the disaster at the mine.
“As you have persistently neglected your study of the affairs of nations I doubt you remember that across the Channel, the Bourbon monarchy had been briefly restored to the throne of France. In 1821 or thereabouts, the revenue accorded the Church by the state was increased above previous allotments. So the Church embarked upon renovations of their crumbling masterpieces of idolatry from which we English can happily count ourselves safely removed.
“Rudge and his associates undertook to advise Bishops and Chevaliers of the Church in their campaigns of preservation, and to supervise projects in Paris and in the outlying regions. It was in the curiosity of Mont-Saint-Michel off the coast of Normandy that the firm of Rudge and Blackwood discovered a small piece of statuary in some tomb or oubliette. A statue of the infant Christ held lovingly by his mother, not without a certain charm despite being sentimental and common. Your grandfather wondered if perhaps the thing had been hidden during one of the periodic attacks on the famous Mont in previous decades, or perhaps it had been there hundreds of years. It was impossible to tell. But your grandfather took a blanket from the cell in which it was found and smuggled the piece out from under the eyes of wolfish prelates, and back to London. I do not know what has become of the artifact but your objectionable narrative about a duel and a murder and an unfaithful woman was shrill and sensational. I should like you to know there is no truth to it at all. Furthermore it is an insult to your sainted grandmother, and she would be very aggrieved indeed to learn about your indiscreet remarks.”
At this John looked up and said, “As far as I know, that’s the sole mention in family records of a duel and a murder. So of course the later members of the family assumed Dorothea must have been telling the truth. But I read on.
“The dreams or visions that your grandfather had occurred a year or two after. He had built the house in Hampstead the which you bind so fondly in memory’s garland. Ozias Rudge was not a young man but, as yet unmarried, perhaps he was disposed to brooding. One year around the time of the solstice, he took ill and spent several days and nights in his bedroom. He claimed to be visited by a spirit from the afterlife, making some sort of a plea. The visions took several forms, and in his final years your grandfather would not always distinguish his original rendition of the tale from the famous Ghosts of Christmas that our Mister Dickens is said to have memorialized from Grandfather’s memories.
“My mother has confirmed what I say with firm conviction. The visiting spirits were said to keen and lament with all manner of distresses. Poor Grandfather! Whatever the ghost was asking, Ozias could not decipher. What remained to Ozias Rudge was this: to step forward into the unblemished life of a married man, to beget and raise his children, to turn his back upon melancholic fancies.
“When my father died, I retired my own sentimental attachment to his stories of haunts and missions. On behalf of my mother, I boarded up all nonsense in which the future might take some interest. In the end, perhaps Charles Dickens made a happier man of Scrooge than my father could ever make of himself. Perhaps Dickens did Ozias a favor in revising and glorifying his own sad memories. Choleric or not, my father loved a good story. This is a regrettable characteristic that I was alarmed to see at Miss Bairnfeather’s you seem to have inherited.”
John turned the page over. “There may have been more or perhaps this was posted without a signature. But the family legend begins with this document, and all corroborating gossip derives from it.”
Gervasa, bottled up too long, began to burble. Winnie couldn’t help it.
“Oh, dear,” said Allegra, turning a shade of pale worthy of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come. “I see what you mean. Oh, John.” She held his hand. He could not suppress a tear, but said huskily to Winnie, “Do you want me to leave this letter here so you can look at it?”
Winnie nodded, not knowing whether Gervasa was approving or recoiling. Whatever she meant, she was saying it in a loud voice. Technically a scream. Nurse came through with a hypo. John and Allegra left. Winnie, tossed back in the sheets with Gervasa nearer than a lover could ever get, struggled to hold on to a few words:
. . . a blanket from the cell . . .
. . . I boarded up all nonsense in which the future might take some interest . . .
Only, Winnie couldn’t tell if it was herself thinking this, or Gervasa beginning to think in English.
As far as she could tell, her next thoughts occurred in her dreams. Were they dreams of Gervasa de Normandie or dreams of Winifred Wendy Rudge Pritzke? There was little in them to get a fistful of, not much more than a notion of Ozias Rudge staggering from a room, bewitched by terrors too insubstantial to name. A shape loomed and lagged behind him. A man with a habit of brooding, surviving his trials by telling them as stories to young Dickens.
Her sense of herself shifted in its sleeve of sleep, collected itself. These days you are no more nor less than Madame Scrooge. Pestered by the same apparition that pestered your ancestor. Did Rudge take Gervasa unto his breast? If so, what did she ask of him there? Why—and how—did he relinquish her again?
Had the painter caught, not Rudge and Scrooge, really, not that coalescence of ancestral and literary figures, but Rudge and de Normandie, two spirits staggering to the door in one corruptible form?
And who was the painter of that picture? Maybe Edward Rudge himself, despite what he had written to his chattery niece. After all, he too may have inherited that choleric and fanciful temperament, and needed to expel the humors somehow.
When I wake up, I must compare the handwriting in Edward’s letter with the scrawl on the back of the painting. But most likely I won’t remember any of this.
Stepping nearer the threshold, struggling with the effort of walking for two. Every step a weight of the present against both the past and the future. In her dream, her feet hurt and she had to pee.
When she awoke, Irv Hausserman was bustling around again, this time with a swatch of ripe holly and pretty red berries he’d swiped with his penknife from the garden of some mansion block. Winnie almost chortled with pleasure. He had a man with him, looking familiar if shrunken and furtive. Quite out of place.
“Ah,” said Winnie. “Curstace.” She was trying to say Christmas.
“Curses to you, too, and how do you do,” said Irv. “It’s about time. You’re sleeping more, and more deeply, than before, and this after they’ve aborted your sleeping tablets. Great nuisance; I’ve had to delay my return home. Now here’s Ritzi Ostertag. Do you remember him?”
Gervasa didn’t. Winnie did. She shook her head and nodded, but in that order, hoping the result would be clear. “Ach, mein Gott,” said Ritzi, in panic, or a send-up of panic meant to make her laugh. But she was beyond such distinctions.
Irv blustered on. “And how are we feeling today?”
We, a lovely joke, a lovely lovely joke. They both laughed.
“I thought,” said Irv, “that I’d give you the latest we’d deduced from your remarks, and then maybe Ritzi could read your palms or your tea leaves or something. Anything for a diversion. Are you up for that?”
Gervasa didn’t know what it meant, so Winnie shrugged. She’d rather have aromatherapy but that didn’t seem to be on offer.
“Well, then,” he said. He placed the tape recorder on the be
d and extracted from it a cassette. He held it up. “This is my tape of you the other day. You’ve provided me with a very interesting document, my dear. Some would say that only a novelist could have managed it. You corroborate and extend what little sense I could make out of what Mrs. M had said. Now let the record show that I post no claims of belief or disbelief, I’ll be right up-front with you about that.” As he talked he was unwrapping the cellophane off a new ninety-minute cassette tape and snapping it into the machine, but he didn’t start it recording yet, as she was being silent, and Gervasa cautious, scrutinizing, and mistrusting.
Did we sign a release, allowing ourselves to be recorded? thought Winnie. But then Gervasa made no growl of mutual irritation; how could she, the technology being unfathomable to her? And Winnie was beyond caring about herself. So she let it go.
“There’s much that can’t be made out,” said Irv. “But exhibiting a suspension of disbelief that is nearly beyond me—I’ll tell you that this tape makes it seem as if you occasionally speak, like Mrs. M, with the voice of someone who died many hundreds of years ago.”
“Tell it as a story,” she said, and then Gervasa began to gargle, and Irv fumbled at the controls to record it. When Gervasa had dried up, though—Winnie had the sense that Gervasa wanted to hear the interpretation too—Irv stopped the machine and started over.
“All right, a story. You seem to be using a voice some of whose language suggests medieval northern France. Thirteenth, fourteenth century. Professor Ambrose Clements, a pleasantly tolerant senior lecturer who holds a post in modern and medieval languages at King’s College, Cambridge, was intrigued enough to give a listen and float some hypotheses. The syntax, such as he can hear, is very simple, devoid of some of the more elegant forms of subjunctive you begin to find in early Renaissance courtly or ecclesiastic prose. He said Anglo-Norman was spoken by the aristocracy through about 1300, though there seems to be an element of Picard in it. But it’s a mess, a pottage; he heard only a limited vocabulary of decodable words embedded within a dense mass of archaic or nonsense syllables. So what passes for a story is hard to say convincingly. Even so, there may be an outline of something. Professor Clements says that if you’re attempting the language of a peasant rather than a nobleman or a clergyman, you’re succeeding. The references are all very sketchy, the narrator has little sense of history or chronology, and the nouns are all common words familiar to a peasant mentality: farming and harvest, donkey, knife, fire, knave, mother, saint, that sort of thing.”