Her marriage was a curious thing. Not at all what she’d expected. But expectations: what are they? Notions imposed by others. The stubborn entrenched ways of the tribe. He proposed to her by leading her to the west wing of his big country house and showing her the perfect study, fully equipped with picture windows looking out over the forest upon the mountains to the west, meaning that on sunny mornings she’d have an illumined postcard view of the mountains and often, in the evenings, spectacular sunsets. He said that if she married him this would be hers—the car, too, of course. In fact, just about anything she desired. She didn’t know if she loved him (what was that?), but she really liked him and felt inclined to say yes, but first he wanted to show her another room. In this one, the Dracula image returned. Bluebeard’s Chamber. It was windowless and full of instruments of torture: stocks, cages, velvet whipping stools, leg and arm cuffs in the walls, glass cases full of canes and belts and whips and paddles, elaborate ropes and pulleys meant for dangling victims, iron maidens, plus film screens and projectors and dance studio mirrors on the walls. “Scary!” she said. “Not for me. I’m just an old-fashioned squeamish all-American girl.” “Oh, it’s not for you. I wouldn’t enjoy that. It’s for me. And other men…” It took her a few moments to take it all in. She remembered his eagerness to show her off in Washington. This room would not win him a lot of votes. “You want me for cover. A kind of job.” “I guess you could look at it that way. But what marriage isn’t? This one’s just a little different. And I do love you, Sally. Love your mind, your wit, your good heart, love your young body.” It probably helps, she was thinking, that it’s on the boyish side. “In a sense I’ve been waiting all my life for someone like you, just as in conventional romances. And you can step out of it whenever you want.” Well, it was pretty weird, but somehow it made a certain sense to her, enough anyway that she smiled and said okay, why not. Try it out. Was the Chamber soundproofed? It was. While she was back in her home state with Simon, she remembered to call her parents and tell them she was married to a nice guy, a bit older, rich, a U.S. Congressman, and when she was more settled and the book was done, they could come visit. “Oh, why don’t you come here?” her mother said. “You know your father doesn’t travel well.”
The perfect study with the postcard views was waiting for her when she returned from the prison interviews (an immaculate snowscape: she couldn’t resist, she ran out and wrote on it), and for the first couple of weeks everything seemed to be going brilliantly as she typed up her notes, papered the walls with clippings and photo blowups, revised her outline and the five completed chapters, and launched a sixth—well over half the book done, according to her outline. It was the legislative season and her husband was away in Washington most of the time, which meant that—though she found that she missed him—every minute of every day was her own, her meals and the house and laundry cared for by a French Canadian woman who came in five days a week and who sometimes regaled her with funny family stories, often remarking, “You should write it in a novel!” They were indeed the sort of stories most novelists feed upon, but Sally was determined not to do that; just get through this one obligatory project, then back to the good stuff, already developing under her left hand, so to speak.
And then, suddenly, two months before her deadline, everything under her right hand fell apart. It was a mere patchwork of lists and fragments, she saw. Nothing held together. The writing was pedestrian, her digressions were tedious and for the most part stolen, the characterizations fatuous and condescending. The only chapter worth keeping was the one set in the Bible college cafeteria. The two before that, the personal narrative of her afternoon in the culvert and an imaginary reconstruction of Billy Don’s beer-drinking high school days were irrelevant and would have to be thrown out, and the one after it—an account of the boys’ missionary travels with the cult—was totally unconvincing. As for the later chapter based on her “Jan” story, she could see now that, shorn of its climax, it was as trivial as any other conventional fiction. And hordes of new characters had come piling in, some real, some fictional. She was completely bogged down in the new chapter she’d begun—their arrival at the camp and its reconstruction—which she realized she knew almost nothing about, having only a fuzzy childhood memory of the church camp and having been banned from seeing what changes the Brunists wrought, all that now lost to the fire. Worse: what lurked just beyond it was the centerpiece Day of Redemption chapter, which she knew in her abysmal ignorance she could never write—what happened after the old lady died? she had almost no idea—and then the climactic holy war chapters and the murder. Impossible. And what if she were wrong about Darren’s guilt? She was toying with a young man’s life. In the trial transcript, Darren says: “I am a religious pacifist. I have never had a gun in my hand all my life and I never will.” Numerous witnesses confirmed this about him. She was wrong. Junior did it. The “LIER.” She had no story. The whole sorry project was a shabby, witless, rickety, undisciplined mess.
When her husband called, as he did almost every day, she told him, laughing, the latest of the maid’s comical tales of family feuding and inbreeding, and said that she had decided to polish the Bible college chapter as a story and send it around and abandon the rest. He heard the panic in her voice, hired a plane for the weekend and flew home. He gently dragged her out of the trash heap that her study had become, first opening the windows to let out the sickening miasma of stale cigarette smoke, and led her into the bedroom, undressed her, and made love to her in a profoundly affectionate way of the sort rarely shown and then generally only after a punishing evening with his friends in the Chamber, leaving her crying softly on the pillow while he crafted a mushroom risotto with shaved truffles and cheese-flavored croutons in the kitchen. He tossed a green salad with garlic and lemon juice, opened a Barbaresco that even she with her nicotine-stunned palate could recognize as a serious wine, and put string quartets on the stereo system. Brahms? Mozart? She wasn’t sure, her musical education only just beginning. She started to explain herself; he put his finger to his lips. “Just listen to the music,” he said with a smile. After dinner he replaced the string quartets with big band music from the swing era and they danced for a while like lovers in an old movie and then went back to bed for another round of sex—slow, almost meditative in nature. “You’re really good at this,” she said, as he studied her from within and from above. “It’s like a skill you have. I suppose you could do it equally well with old crones or chimpanzees or trained seals.” “Probably,” he said, smiling down on her. Appreciatively, she thought. “I do have quite a lot of sex. But only rarely the opportunity to make love.”
She woke to find breakfast awaiting her and her study locked from the inside. Which frightened her. Perhaps, fearing for her sanity, he was destroying it all. She raised her fist to bang on the door, thought better of it, returned to her breakfast, hit the on-switch on the coffee-maker. Eventually he joined her, kissed her gently on that nice place behind the ear (she rather hoped he’d nip her lobe, but he didn’t; what he might call consistency of style), and said he’d spent some time with her typescript, he hoped she didn’t mind. She did, but at this moment she was too fond of him to say so. He praised it, found it “vivid, provocative, dark yet funny,” etc. He had something else to say. She could wait for it. “I especially loved the high school beer party and the flagellation scenes.”
“You would. But I’ve taken them out.”
“Really? Also, I didn’t find the cemetery story.”
“It’s gone, too. It didn’t seem to fit in anywhere and I’d have had to explain too much if I used it.”
“A pity. When you told me the story I remember laughing a lot and at the same time feeling a gathering anxiety, not so much because of the setting, but because of increasing apprehension about the blond boy. He seemed quietly and dangerously crazed. Not someone you’d want to be alone with in a cemetery or anywhere else. I think it would make a good first chapter. It sums everything up while k
eeping it all intriguingly mysterious.”
“I have a first chapter.” He smiled, sipped coffee, said nothing. “You don’t think I have a first chapter.”
“You have a kind of foreword. Or afterword, maybe. Not in the voice of ‘the girl,’ as you call her, but in your own. It is too argumentative for a novel chapter, but it works as a way of explaining how you got involved with this story and why you decided to write it. It’s a place where you can summarize the cult history as you came to know it and comment on it in your own voice, and that saves you having to do that inside the novel itself. You’re going to want to end the novel much like you ended the story, and you can use the afterword to fill in the rest of what happened that day and to report on the trials and sentences that resulted, which are part of the book’s motivations. Also, in our very first conversation at the writers’ colony, you unleashed some of your pet theories about cognitive dissonance and collective effervescence, and the afterword would give you the opportunity to indulge yourself a bit.”
“Not my theories, I’m afraid.”
“I know that. But they fit. Credit them if you think you must. But help us see what you see.”
“This is going to take forever.”
“Won’t be easy, but you may be further along than you think.” By now they had their coats and boots on, caps and gloves, and were entering the woods on a winter walk. About a mile further on, she knew, having been there before on her own, the land fell away and he or someone had built a rustic outlook with rough-hewn picnic tables for the summer. Always a surprise when one got there because neither the overlook nor the valley could be seen from the house. On the way, as they shuffled through the snow, stirring up creatures on either side of them, he pointed out that she already had enough for a book, though only half was probably worth keeping, and he encouraged her to rethink her removal of the flagellation and rape scene, because she probably wanted the boys with their alternating points of view to think more about Young Abner. When she protested he wasn’t her character, Darren and Billy Don were, and besides he was totally unattractive, a stupid, sullen boy, he reminded her that Young Abner was the one on death row and said maybe she could try to make sullenness and stupidity interesting. “Make room for plain, ordinary ugliness. The everyday tragic drama of the impoverished spirit.” She was thinking about this. She was resisting it. But he may be right, she was thinking. He is right, damn him. They emerged from the woods and reached the overlook. The air was exhilaratingly cold and clean. As they talked, the book settled into its new shape. It was as if she were gazing out upon it, metamorphosing before her eyes down in the snowy sunlit valley: the cemetery openers, the Bible college cafeteria meeting with some background bits cannibalized from the high school chapter, the two friends drawing together during their travels and establishment of the camp, their falling apart after the attempted seduction scenes of her short story, Darren moving toward the Baxterites, Billy Don staying loyal to the Clara Collins people. The cult schism: way to talk about that.
“Sounds good,” he said. “What’s left?”
“The end of their relationship. The murder.” Six chapters, counting the afterword, three of them more or less written. She took off one of her gloves to pull out a cigarette, but he also took a glove off and held her hand and that was better. She felt spectacularly healthy.
Before her husband returned to the Capitol, he had one night with his friends in what he called the “library,” but by then she was beavering away in her study once more, earphones on to stifle any sounds that might leak from the Chamber. The front two and back two chapters, she foresaw, would more or less write themselves; the middle two would be more difficult, but now that they were defined as coming-together and falling-apart chapters, all the peripheral material dropped away into the background, and her two characters rose to the fore. She was having fun writing again.
When he came to bed that last night, she hugged him and thanked him. He was trembling still from whatever it was he had just gone through. “You’re like something out of a fairytale,” she said.
“Think of me more,” he murmured, “as a character from one of those Victorian novels you profess to hate. A kind of ambassador from them, as you might say.”
“If it’s your mission, Mr. Ambassador, to lure me into those tired woods, you will not succeed. It’s the wildness I want.” He laughed softly, sleepily, squeezed her hand.
In interviews she is often asked what she is working on now. When she tried to answer the question seriously, she only drew baffled stares and impatient interruptions: Didn’t she have another faction in mind? So she finally learned to duck the question by pretending she didn’t like to talk about work in progress and then, after she’d repeated it a few times, she was no longer pretending. To her agent, she has to be more specific. Gets an irritable sigh in return. Bad girl. The word “career” comes up again. When Sally dismisses it, the agent wants to know what, then, she needs him for. “To hold my hand when the rejections come in,” she says with a smile, and he looks pained but shrugs and smiles back.
The interviewers also ask, inevitably, about her disputing of the trial verdict and her legally unproven assumption that the real killer, whom she names, was not the one convicted by the court. Isn’t she liable to legal action herself? Yes, she is. But she is right. Or so she says when asked. Actually, throughout the writing, the doubt never went away. Doubt and the overcoming of doubt—it was like something out of one of those Brunist sermons she attended. Have faith, my daughter. Essentially Simon’s message whenever she called him. “Don’t worry. Darren killed your friend, then handed off the murder weapon to Young Abner just as he said he did and sent him back to the camp as the fall guy, everything points to it, and because the kid is naïve and stupid he fell for it. Might be hard to prove in a court of law if you got challenged, but I don’t think Rector would want to take the risk. Expect Christian forbearance.”
After they received the typescript, her publishers were also suddenly doubt-stricken. They sent her a list of requested alterations, and the first one was that she change all the real names to fictional ones, as in her published story. When she refused, they began demanding harsh cuts. What they seemed to hate most was her best writing. She sent a copy to her old workshop teacher and asked his opinion. A bit hasty, a few loose ends, but it’s a well-made book with a compelling story, he told her. Don’t give in. “The literary judgments of commercial publishers aren’t to be trusted. They don’t trust them themselves and will eventually back down.” They did, but made her sign a statement accepting full responsibility for any legal actions against the book. Simon told her not to worry, she had a good lawyer on her side.
She was proofing galleys when Simon called to say he had managed to secure yet another stay of execution for all five of the remaining condemned—not including Nathan Baxter and his gang, who may or may not have died in the East Texas massacre—but that it may be their last opportunity. And he had good news for her. Through his contacts in the area, he had managed to obtain for her a ten-minute meeting with Clara Collins-Wosznik. Word had gotten around about his law firm’s defense of the imprisoned Brunists and they were grateful. But Clara was said to be very weak, and ten minutes was all they could allow. He had made it clear that they should stop demonizing Miss Elliott, a talented young woman committed to their cause and an invaluable research assistant for his legal team. Moreover, she had something important to tell them. “I told them what you told me. That it was an act of redemption.” It was another last opportunity: Once the book was out, that door would be slammed shut.
She was able to bring Clara a gift. Simon had asked to see again the things removed from Billy Don’s car in case there was something there he could use that he’d missed before. There wasn’t, but he found a framed document wrapped in a sweatshirt at the bottom of Billy Don’s carrier bag which, according to the inscription on the back, was Ely Collins’ last note before he died in the Deepwater mine disaster, something Billy D
on apparently rescued at the last minute. The glass was cracked, but otherwise it looked undamaged. Simon was able to sign out for it on the condition it would be returned to the widow. Sally had a receipt for Clara to sign, which she did with a trembling hand. Might have been emotions, might have been her frailty. Her hair was gone and she chose not to cover her baldness. A kind of defiant nakedness with which Sally empathized. Brought out her gaunt masculine features, but her essential femininity was what you saw. The gentle matriarch. She was surrounded by other women who called her Sister Clara. All unsmiling, watching Sally. But moved, she could see, by the return of the death note. A red-headed toddler joined them. One of the prisoners they interviewed had said there was a rumor that Elaine’s baby was not completely human, but this was a real kid, a bit scrawny but feisty and bright-eyed. His mother came out to snatch him up and Sally asked her please to stay, she had something to tell her. Elaine turned away in alarm but her mother called her over to her side and fearfully she went there, toddler in arms, her mouth pinched shut. Sally said there were three things she was trying to accomplish: to free as many of the jailed Brunists as possible, to get all the death penalties thrown out or reduced to prison time, and to find out how her friend Billy Don Tebbett got killed. “Junior Baxter did not shoot Billy Don. We know that now. So who did?” The women looked at each other. Something was being confirmed. But what Clara said was: “We don’t know.” They didn’t know where Darren Rector was either and would say no more. Half her time was up, so, starting with the trail of the red boots, Sally told them the story of Carl Dean Palmers, looking straight at Elaine. “I just wanted you to know. He was so brave. One against a whole gang. All of them with guns and knives. He loved you. Enough to die for you. Few of us can say as much.” Elaine’s mother seemed to be wilting, her head dipping. “Ben always said…” she whispered, and one of the other women, nodding, said: “I knew it.” “He is lying in a pauper’s grave in the municipal cemetery. Not far from Marcella Bruno, actually.” The girl showed no sign of emotion, other than the fear that seemed to reside in her. But who knows, maybe she touched her. And then Sally had to leave because Clara had to be helped back to bed. The woman who had spoken introduced herself as Ludie Belle Shawcross and accompanied her to her car. “Billy Don, he was a sweetheart,” she said. “Not much of a believer and less a one as time went on. I reckon you maybe had sumthin to do with that. Which ain’t a concern. But if you’re thinkin’ it was Darren mighta done him, well, you could be right. He’s got a mighty high notion of hisself, like he’s set above the rest of us and ain’t obliged to play by the rules. He ain’t none too poplar round here for the way he’s took things outa Clara’s hands. And now she’s dyin’ he ain’t got no further use of her.” They stood by the car, talking for a few minutes, but when Sally asked if they could stay in touch, Ludie Belle said, “Druther not. Done’s done.”