James McCreery, in his book on the subject, suggests that the end result of the natural history museum is the satisfaction of human wonder. How are life-forms related? Why did differences arise? The museum promises to put such questions to rest by replicating the cyclical events of nature in all their theatrical splendor. With its lifelike specimens posed in action and mounted in muraled alcoves, the diorama—or “habitat group,” as it has come to be called, since it represents different species of plants and animals coexisting within the same setting—is designed to give visitors the feeling that they have been transported to a distant part of the world, a feeling that has intensified with the advances in taxidermy. In museums across the country, the lights are kept dimmed, skeletons of dinosaurs reach to the ceiling, whale carcasses hang overhead, and the elaborate displays tell the story of nature, an exciting story that doesn’t want for violence.
Today, a typical natural history museum offers hands-on computer games, creepy-crawly houses, exploding volcanoes, big-bang shows, orbiting planets, simulated rain forests, drops of pond water magnified one thousand times. The museum thrills even as it explains, illuminating nature in all its vicious and still logical particularity. For nature is logical, according to the story told by a natural history museum. Follow the story from mineral to stone to fossil to fish to reptile to mammal to man, and there you are, the net result, the reward for all the suffering that life entails, as well as the culprit: you, the reason for your questions, and the answer.
Yet there are smaller out-of-the-way museums, underfunded and poorly maintained, that display their animals like articles of used clothing, like stoles and hats and coats that have long since fallen out of fashion and are interesting only as memorabilia. In such places, you’re apt to find the plate glass scratched and grimy, the light so glaring you have to strain to see the animals within the cases. These museums tell a different story, one truer to Darwin: of rough-and-tumble congregations where there was never enough food on the banquet table to go around, so they’d erupt in bloody free-for-alls. Afterward, a few survivors would creep back into the forest and carry on the species, sustaining themselves, if not thriving. It is a melancholy story, occasionally punctuated with surprises—two-headed sheep, albino starlings, mountain goats with three eyes, Cro-Magnon skulls with holes drilled neatly through the cranium. Visitors will leave more puzzled than ever, wondering whether there were any purpose to this madness, wondering whether the whole concept of evolution is some great paradigmatic joke, at their expense.
* * *
Musculus: pectoralis major and minor, easy enough to imitate, though the nearby detroideus could be trouble, and the sartorius, oh, the sartorius, now that will be fun, running as it does right beneath the plump inner thigh and heading up to the adductor longus, the seductive adductor longus, so much like the base of a braid twisted into a regal topknot, the tissue wrapping in neat strands around the bone, according to the diagrams in Henry Craxton Senior’s copy of Gray’s Anatomy, which Boggio has pilfered from the Manikin’s library. The trick is to construct a perfect illusion from clay, wood, and papier-mâché, so that the stillness of a finished trophy will evoke motion, the glass eyes will evoke rage, and, most important, the mouth will evoke sound. A mediocre taxidermist cares only about surfaces. But peer into the orifices of Boggio’s animals—the throats continue into the darkness of the neck, the nostrils snake back into throat, and his anuses are always longer than the longest forefinger. So much unappreciated effort, but still, Boggio worships quality, and with any one project will take painstaking care to make the form accurate so that the rippling muscles correspond exactly to the original body and the hide fits as tightly as the skin around the flesh of an apple.
And then came the supreme challenge. Not that Boggio ever believed in the opportunity. He may be a fool, but he’s not so foolish that he mistakes a fiction for truth. He was responsible for delivering the testimony, that’s all, just a testimony contrived by Craxton, recorded word for word, and signed by Boggio, with his characteristic flourish at the end of his name, a curlicue rising above the final o.
But Boggio has been letting himself imagine it. Strange that he never let himself imagine this ultimate trophy before. Certainly he’d noticed the uncanny similarities between, say, a woman’s hand and the long-fingered paw of the lemur he mounted years ago, when Craxton’s Scientific was in its early heyday. Or the human expression of the silverback gorilla Akeley brought back from Africa. But to represent the human species itself, to turn actual human flesh into a museum display—the ambition had never even occurred to Boggio. Or if it occurred to him in some shadowy corner of his mind, he didn’t let himself indulge the thought. It was Craxton’s idea, a lie worth one hundred smackers to Boggio, along with the guarantee that he could live out the rest of his days at the Manikin. Mrs. Craxton stuffed and mounted, frozen forever in the midst of some quotidian act. Since he agreed to take part in the plot, Boggio has spent long hours imagining the splendid detail possible, the orifices leading into the dark interior of the false form, the artificial tongue sinking into the trachea, the trachea disappearing into oblivion. And that other oblivion between the cavernous hips—the dark soul of woman. He could make a perfect imitation if he were given free reign. He’d buy the most expensive glass eyeballs from a prosthetic supply company. He’d mix up a concoction of sawdust and clay to stuff into the duodenum to plump the abdomen. He’d collect a cupful of chicken shit and pack it into the rectum. He’d commission the renowned waxwork company in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to make a wax meal—turkey with all the trimmings, a glass of wax cider—then he’d sit Mrs. Mary Craxton at her table in all her fleshy splendor, and if anyone tried to lift her and move her to another setting, out would drop a healthy turd or two.
Boggio, you old devil, you! It is noontime on Saturday after a tumultuous week full of bribes and lawyers and questions and lies. There’s no going back now, no undoing the story he’s been paid to tell. Old fool. Maybe he’s a fool, but he’s a mischievous fool who answers to nobody. Old Boggio, nobody’s fool. What fun he’s had imagining the challenge of an old woman’s body. He’d smooth away air bubbles so the skin would fit everywhere, even over the two lumps of loosely bound excelsior—the sagging breasts—even over the wrinkled clay wattle beneath her chin. He would work the skin, coax it to shrink wherever it appeared superfluous and stretch it into wrinkles and folds in the appropriate places. Boggio knows no more powerful pleasure than this: crowning a well-made manikin with a skin and seeing a specimen take on perfect shape, as if by magic. There is no art closer to magic than Boggio’s art. The art of exact representation. The only thing he can’t give back to Mrs. Craxton is her life.
Her life. And so the humbling thought intrudes at last: life, with all of its heartbreaks and adventures. Life. No, he can’t bring Mary Craxton back to life. The admission, however obvious, is enough to darken Boggio’s mood. He is sitting in front of his work table, his hands palms down on the wooden surface. It occurs to him that he has to piss. He always has to piss, there is hardly a minute when he doesn’t have to piss. And his muscles ache, his entire body aroused by his flight of necrophilic fancy. He feels as though he’s been old for seventy years, as though he’d been born wizened and feeble, the world too much for him before he’d even learned to walk. Poor old Boggio. Mad old Boggio. He’s the butt of every joke that’s ever been told, brought into existence for the sole purpose of supplying all the mudslingers with a target. He wipes the mud from his eyes with his thumb. Craxton’s mud. Boggio gave him what he wanted—a false testimony about Mary Craxton’s desire concerning her remains. Boggio is one hundred dollars richer for it, as well as a resident of the Manikin for life—providing, of course, that Craxton wins his petition. He will win, thanks to Boggio. But what a huge, debilitating effort of the imagination, and Boggio’s god is laughing, yes, Boggio’s god is thoroughly amused—and thoroughly appalled. To think that foolish old Boggio could aspire to such a grand act of profanity! There will be no forgiveness.
Damn fool Boggio. All that’s left is to return the insult. Come on, you old clown, just do what I say, don’t think twice. In Boggio’s confused mind, he has agreed to a sinful act. He’ll never see the angels now. He has deprived himself of salvation. It was Craxton who corrupted him. So Craxton must be punished, too. But what can Boggio do to ruffle such a powerful man? A teaspoon of gunpowder in his cigar? A dead mouse in his soup? But these are old tricks, and knowing Craxton he’d just spoon the mouse out and continue eating. What Boggio would really like to do is to put his mouth flat against the sleeping man’s ear and scream loud enough to burst his eardrum. Even the most sophisticated gentleman will lose his poise if he’s woken from a deep sleep with a bloodcurdling scream. But Boggio doesn’t have the voice for it, nor the courage.
His head pivots, his attention drawn by the magnetic summons of his most perfect creature, his beloved snowy owl. Now here’s a thought. “Yes,” Boggio murmurs, continuing the conversation aloud. The owl sits on the windowsill, shrieking silently, its evil eye fixed on some spot on the wall beyond Boggio. Ah, yes, of course. Boggio will use his snowy owl to get back at Hal Craxton—he’ll return abuse with abuse and scare the master silly. That’s what Craxton deserves for corrupting Boggio’s imagination, along with his name. “Yes,” Boggio repeats with immense satisfaction, settling back to wait for the night. He will see to it that the man gets his just deserts. “Yes, indeed!”
* * *
What a day, what a blustery, invigorating spring day, the perfect day for a fancy gentleman to tour the countryside. And since Hal Craxton no longer has a full-time chauffeur on the premises, he has no choice but to solicit the help of his groundskeeper.
The touring car, a fancy La Salle, was purchased last summer by Mrs. Craxton to replace her Stanley Steamer, and it has been sitting in the garage for four long months. It takes all morning for Lore to bring the automobile off its block, put the wheels back on, and get the motor running. Craxton’s original idea had been a morning drive with lunch at the Millworth Inn. Although he had to change his plans and idled away his morning waiting for Lore to coax the La Salle awake, he’s in a cheerful, backslapping mood when he finally crosses the muddy drive—on tiptoe, to keep his oxfords clean—with his crocheted auto blanket slung over his shoulder and his cap cocked back on his head.
“Ready to go, old Sally?” he pipes, addressing the automobile directly; Lore, who is sitting on the front bumper smoking a cigarette, doesn’t bother to reply. “Yes, sir, I’m ready and raring!” Craxton answers himself. “Oh, but wait, wait! We’ll have company, Lore, a regular saint she is, not the kind of gal you’d call pretty, but acceptable nonetheless. More than acceptable. Don’t you agree?” Lore flounders for a moment, confused by the ambiguous pronoun, but just as he’s about to ask, “Who’s that, sir?” he sees the object of Craxton’s praise stalking in her galoshes toward the garage. It is an image so familiar that he forgets, temporarily, the suggestive description that preceded her and assumes that an old routine is being resumed: a shopping trip to Millworth or Kettling, with Hal Craxton sitting in for his mother and Lore taking Red Vic’s place, different players, the same unexceptional situation. But it takes only one more glance for Lore to see that something has changed. Mrs. Griswood doesn’t meet his eyes. She looks beyond him at the automobile, surveys it with what Lore detects as a vaguely covetous expression, though he quickly dismisses the judgment, for it doesn’t fit his notion of Ellen Griswood, who stands before him in her drab, rust-colored raincoat and brown felt hat, as plain and irreproachable a woman as you’ll ever find.
“Coming with us, Mrs. Griswood?” Lore asks, realizing too late that with this question he has cast himself as Craxton’s companion, when in fact Ellen is the chosen guest for the day and won’t sit in front as she usually does on excursions but instead will join Craxton in the backseat. In back, the two of them, like husband and wife! Lore cannot hide his astonishment when Hal extends his hand and with a gentle leer helps Ellen up into her place.
“Hello, Lore Bennett. Lore, are you there?” Craxton teases, and Lore snaps his hanging jaw closed. “Well then, old Sally,” Craxton purrs as he climbs up beside Ellen. Lore waits only a second for him to swivel onto the seat before he slams the backdoor shut, just missing Craxton’s foot.
“Damn you, Lore!”
“Sorry, sir,” Lore mutters as he slips into the driver’s seat, though secretly he wishes he’d been faster with the door and had crushed Craxton’s dainty, aristocratic ankle. He stares at the dashboard for a moment, unable to make sense of this machine, his memory overwhelmed by the illogical situation. Ellen Griswood is Craxton’s housekeeper, not his wife. And Lore Bennett is a groundskeeper, not a chauffeur. The world has been thrown into a flux again, and Lore gropes in confusion, trying to find the button that would set things right. And then his hand remembers what his mind doesn’t—that the key must be inserted into the ignition, the choke extended, the clutch released, and the engine boosted with a surge from the accelerator. Off they go, like three fish in a bottle, Lore thinks, three freshwater fish caught in a bottle that is being dragged downriver out to sea.
He glances at the rearview mirror, sees Craxton’s head turn toward Ellen and his cheek plump when he smiles. The words are dispersed by the wind, but Lore can tell that Craxton is doing all the talking while Ellen Griswood listens politely. Although Lore can see only the top of her hat in his mirror, somehow he senses that she’s embarrassed. Or maybe he just assumes that this is her main emotion because that’s what he wants her to feel—embarrassed by Hal Craxton’s attention and by Lore’s disapproval.
“To the right, Lore.” Craxton spits out the order and then leans back to converse with Ellen. As Lore pulls out onto Hadley Road, he steals another glance at the mirror. If Ellen hadn’t been so obviously gracious when Craxton helped her into the auto, Lore might still think her blameless. But no, she’s to be blamed for accepting Craxton’s hand, for sharing a seat and a blanket with him, for listening to his aimless chitchat.
As they drive past the Gill farm, Craxton leans forward again and tells Lore to take Gulf Road east and to pick up Marfield Road at the intersection and head south. Lore obeys the directions, though it is a route he has rarely taken before. Buffalo lies to the northwest, Rochester directly north of Millworth. There is nothing of interest to the south, nothing but potato farms and untillable slopes inhabited by indolent groundhogs and deer and an occasional black bear. But Hal Craxton pretends that he has a destination in mind. So Lore keeps south, skirting along Tonawanda Creek for ten miles or so and then continuing on through the postal-route towns of Arcade and Freedom. The scattered farms look poorer the farther south they drive, and eventually the road narrows, hemmed in by vegetation that will all but block the way by summer.
As he drives, squinting against the wind and sun, Lore finds himself imagining a bridge, a narrow stone bridge that would carry them across time into deep summer, when this road will be overgrown with sumac and creeping ivy. Lore would drive so far into the underbrush that they’d lose their way, and they’d have to abandon the La Salle, leave it trapped in the net of weeds, and make their way across the countryside to safety. That would be a humbling lesson for Hal Craxton. For Ellen, too, yes, she could stand a grueling stint in the wilderness, nothing between her and starvation but Lore Bennett, as clever a woodsman as you’ll ever find. Maybe she’d come to appreciate him.
Lore is so far lost in this dream of heroism that at first he doesn’t notice when mud replaces the macadam, but when he does notice, he is pleased, and not surprised. Most minor roads in this vast backwater eventually peter out in dirt lanes and then end in the middle of unmarked land—their own Hadley Road is still unpaved. Rather than slowing to better negotiate the difficult surface, he picks up speed, so they bump and plunge through the mud like a skiff on a roiling sea, hitting each mound with a smack and careening through and across the deep ruts. A glimpse in the mirror assures Lore that Hal Craxton has ceased his monologue and is concentrating only on remaining in his seat, while Ellen keeps leaning toward the front, as though to make sure that there is someone driving and they haven’t been abandoned to the frothy waves. Oh, don’t worry, sweet lady, Lore will bring you safely to shore, he’ll keep you from capsizing, and if you remember to, you can thank him at the end, thank him extra kindly by giving up whatever ambitions you have concerning Mr. Hal Craxton.
And then they stop, not abruptly but with a slide sideways and a whir. Lore’s thoughts spin with the wheels until he hears Hal Craxton shouting and he understands what has happened. The La Salle is stuck in the mud, the back wheels sunk deep into twin ruts. They are stuck. Stuck! And it’s up to Lore to save them!
Now what is Craxton jabbering about? He’s perturbed, that’s for sure, and he’s addressing the issue of Lore’s ineptitude. Stuck here in the middle of nowhere, stuck in the mud, and all because Lore had to drive like a maniac, you’d have thought he was being pursued by the Four Horsemen when in fact the intention had been a leisurely drive through the countryside, and then lunch. Hal Craxton wants his lunch, so what is Lore going to do about it?
“We’ll have to push.” Ellen, not Lore, makes the suggestion, provoking from Hal an impatient titter.
“Push?”
“Push. We’ll have to get out and push.”
But Hal isn’t prepared to sully his spring seersucker with mud, not even for the sake of a lady. And the idea that the lady herself should muck about … if he weren’t mildly amused by the suggestion, he’d be appalled. “Lore will get us out of this fix, won’t you, Lore? I can manage at the wheel, I suppose. And you, Mrs. Griswood, you will take care of yourself. No, stay there, ma’am. Let the men handle this one.”
Far from minding the mud, Lore enjoys the way it slurps and sucks around his boots as he trudges to the rear of the La Salle, his feet sinking ankle deep. Hal manages to swing from the backseat into the driver’s seat without touching ground. It takes him a few minutes to locate the brake and accelerator, and in the meantime Lore wedges himself firmly against the bumper, throws his weight forward, and sets the vehicle rocking. When it slides back he pushes it forward again, catches it on the backswing, and with a grunt heaves it free of the rut. In that split second he catches sight of Ellen, who is twisting in her seat to watch him, and he thinks of a skiff again, imagines that he has just pushed her out to sea against her will. He searches her unreadable face for some sign of terror, but just then Craxton compresses the accelerator, the wheels spin, and the surge splatters Lore head to toe with mud.
Shit-colored mud. Cold, pasty, stinking mud. Lore is used to mud and spends the damp months of spring and fall coated with it. But this mud, crapped by a luxury automobile, is an insult. Tarred and feathered by Mr. Craxton, with Ellen Griswood as witness. Ellen Griswood, housekeeper. Lore might as well be covered with shit. In Mrs. Griswood’s eyes, it’s all the same—blood, shit, clay, dirt, mud. It’s all filth, and now Lore stands in front of her, a filthy brute, a beast, no, more disgusting than an animal because he could at least take out his handkerchief and wipe his face, but he doesn’t bother.
Is someone laughing? Hal Craxton is supposed to laugh; instead, he’s twisting around to get a better look at Lore, his lips raised and tucked behind the fold of his right cheek in an expression that indicates both amusement and irritation. But someone is laughing. Someone is laughing quietly, like a girl reading a novel, so absorbed that she doesn’t realize she is laughing out loud. Ellen Griswood. Ellen! Ellen is laughing and at the same time pressing her fist against her mouth to contain the sound.
The insult of it. The hilarity. Lore impulsively plays along, not by laughing but by acting in such an outrageous manner that the memory will startle him for years afterward. He reaches one hand under his armpit and scratches, then leaps with an ape’s hunched agility onto the rear bumper, yelling “Woo, woo, woo!” at Ellen Griswood—and jumps back down again with an obscene slurp into the mud. “Hah, hah, hah!” He cavorts alongside the auto until he reaches the driver’s door, which he leans over with a violent, lunging motion. And oh how satisfying that brief sensation of power, when Hal Craxton cringes and Lore brings his filthy face perilously close.
“Lore, what are you doing?”
“Excuse me, Mr. Craxton. I’m sorry.”
“Let me get back to my seat, please.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now take us home, and no more of your antics, eh?”
“Yes, sir.”
So back he takes them, circling when the lane widens in a dead end and driving slowly and decisively through the mud, back to the Manikin, back to that fortress in the wild.
* * *
The journey Hal Craxton makes later that night, tucked comfortably between flannel sheets—the same sheets he’d slept on as a boy—repeats the day’s drive. With the lights off and the shade raised so he can see the new crescent of the moon, he follows in his mind’s eye the scenery they’d passed in daylight: ramshackle cabins, roofless barns, and behind the desolate fields, forest stretching as far as he could see. He recalls the subject of his conversation with Mrs. Griswood—a comparison of the North American wilderness with the cultivated European countryside, where every tree has a surname and every square foot of land a legend attached to it. In America, the land outside the towns and cities has little historical interest for a man of Hal Craxton’s temperament. Still, he enjoys an excursion now and then, and perhaps he’ll come to like the region better as time goes on.
That image of her windblown face begins as an ice sculpture in Hal’s memory and melts into his bold advance. Mrs. Griswood. Ellen. May I call you Ellen? His hand, his sly hand. Her lap covered with the auto blanket. His hand on top of the blanket, resting feather-lightly on her leg. His hand beneath the blanket. As Hal drifts toward sleep, he feels that peculiar pocket of heat that a woman keeps trapped between her thighs. With each bump and lurch of the car, his hand had gripped her leg more firmly, and yet she hadn’t protested or shifted away from him, hadn’t uttered a single word for that matter, and Hal wonders whether she would have stopped him if he’d tried to slip his hand beneath her skirt. How willing is she? He must find out. Ellen Griswood is a mother and a widow, a combination Hal has never known before—the complex mystery of this plain, uncanny woman makes her irresistible.
Hal sleeps and his memory drifts on to the moment when the La Salle slid into that wretched mud. And here the dreaming mind takes over, scattering the remembered images, and Hal is running through a soupy marsh, or trying to run, but his imagination plays one of its common tricks and turns his blood to lead—he can hardly lift his legs, and then a loop of tangled bog grass catches his toe, and he falls forward to his knees. He catches sight of a woman’s gray-coated back between the tree trunks. Hello! he calls, but she disappears. Is he running toward her, or are they both fleeing from a common predator? Hal can’t be sure. All he knows is that he must try to run, so he clambers to his feet again and slogs off. And just when the fear becomes unbearable, he finds himself in a clearing dappled with sunlight, and there in front of him is Mrs. Griswood on her hands and knees, scrubbing the moss with a brush. She turns to look at him, bending her neck like a horse snapping at a fly on its hindquarters. Mrs. Griswood! Ellen, what are you doing? Without a word she lifts her skirt and apron above her waist, lifts her bare arse higher, and waits for Hal to have his fun. So he falls upon her, ravenous, his earlier panic forgotten. He enters her roughly, gripping her around the waist. But instead of peaking, his excitement diminishes, and he plunges deeper, pumps so hard it feels to him as though he is sawing poor Mrs. Griswood in half.
But he’s not clutching his housekeeper now—he is sitting at the dining-room table and carefully cutting a piece from his seersucker suit with a steak knife. He spears the cloth with his fork and places it in his mouth, chews slowly, with more interest than distaste.
So the night goes, his pent-up imagination exhausting itself in its typical fashion after the dormancy of his waking hours. And when dawn throws its arc of light over the trees, Hal is dreaming that he’s trapped on an outcropping of rock high above a raging river. And there’s his mother—a young, athletic version of her—leaning over the edge of the cliff. She extends her hand but can’t reach him; she disappears, presumably to fetch a rope. Hal tries to keep his heavy eyelids open, since he’s afraid that if he lets himself sleep he’ll roll off the rock. But his eyes insist on closing, so he gives up and rests them for what he intends to be only a minute. Then he realizes that he has been asleep, for how long he doesn’t know—he blinks, reaches out instinctively to grab the rope he hopes his mother has lowered for him, and instead his fingertips brush against the feathers of a huge winged monster, half tiger, half bird, that is diving toward him, screaming, her beak open wide enough to swallow him whole. Before he realizes that the ungodly voice he hears is his own and the monster just a trophy, a stuffed bird, some kind of predator bird, an owl, yes, just an owl mounted on a piece of wood, he loses his hold, slips sideways, and falls. He is falling, falling, falling backward into the rapids. Above him, the monster settles on his bedside table, tucks in her wings, and watches.