Mother was disappointed when I arrived at my family’s apartment alone.
“Johnny, you promised to bring a friend,” she said with a little laugh and a flutter of her hand.
I forced a smile.
“I’m sorry, Mother. Everyone seemed to be busy or out of town. I suppose you’ll just have to settle for me.”
“Will you stay to dinner at least?” my sister asked.
“I will eat you out of house and home, I promise,” I said.
“And leave us to sit alone while he and your father smoke their Havanas,” Mother said. “Charming evening.”
“Mother, I swear the next time you see me it will be with every American art student I can catch in my net,” I said.
“If I cared so much for Americans, I would never have come to Europe, Johnny,” my mother said. “Bring anyone, so long as they are intelligent, charming, and single. But no Impressionists. Some of them are not gentlemen.”
“And don’t bring that Rembrandt fellow either.” My sister laughed. “Drinks like a fish and lives with a woman. Scandalous man.”
“Emily, for shame!” said my mother.
Father came into the room, carrying a large new book about the Civil War.
“Ah, John, good to see you,” he said. “Been reading about our fleet at New Orleans in ’62. I’ll tell you all about it after dinner.” “Thank you, Father,” I said. “But I’d very much like to continue our conversation from last time.”
“Oh,” he said, “so that matter’s not dealt with. Very well.”
He went back into his study and put the book away.
After dinner Father and I escaped there and closed the door.
We lit cigars, and our smoke mingled with our silence. At last, my father said, “Which play is it this time? Still Macbeth?”
“No,” I said. “Stranger than that. More like A Winter’s Tale, where the statue comes to life.”
I told him everything that had happened at the Janus Gate, even the part that was most difficult for me to speak of, the desire I had felt for the creature with whom I had fallen in love.
My father leaned forward as I spoke, his sad eyes locked on mine, his cigar twitching like a compass needle seeking the true north of my story.
When I had finished, he said, “You should leave Paris at once. I will send you word when the Boits have gone.”
“I can’t do that, Father,” I said. “I must help the girls in any way I can.
“I agree,” my father said. “And that is the best way to do it. Thesurest way, at any rate. You must break the connection between you.”
“But why?”
Straight through the torpedoes like Farragut at Mobile Bay, that had always been his advice until now.
“Surgery,” my father said. “You and those girls together have created this madness. And it is madness, son. Their need for love is so intense, their mother is so heartless, that they have conjured this creature out of your art. Something in your desire for beauty called out to them from the canvas, and together they wove a spell for themselves. A spell so strong that it has drawn you in. It will only grow stronger as they lead you into it.”
“I only wish it were as simple as you say,” I replied. “But, Father, this creature is not just some fever dream. She’s real. To some extent, at least. And so is that damned doll.”
“Madness is real,” my father said. “Evil is real. And this evil has been manipulating those girls for at least a year. She is manipulating you now.”
“She can’t control me,” I said.
“There is more than one way of controlling someone, John. As I can tell you from my own life.”
My father put his hand on my arm.
“With all her creators under her spell, she will be safe and powerful,” my father said. “And you will all be mad.”
“But Florence is mad now, or close to it,” I said. “And Jane knows she will be next. If I do leave Paris, what will happen to them?”
My father did not answer at once. It was not that he did not know what to say. I was certain that he did. But he was a long time finding the way to say it.
“One of the worst things about being a doctor, Johnny, is that there is so much one knows and so little one can do to help.”
“But there must be something!” I insisted. “If I cannot help them, you must. You must.”
“If you leave, that may weaken her,” Father said. “Weaken it. Then when the Boits leave the city, that may weaken it further. But there is no known way to treat most forms of madness. People either heal themselves or they do not.”
“Very well, Dr. Sargent,” I said. “What is your prognosis? What hope do you see for these girls?”
“I expect this thing will continue its work upon them,” he said slowly. “I expect it is too strong to be stopped. I believe it will draw them all into its service and worship. But it must not have you.” “Father, that’s not good enough,” I said.
“Johnny, there is nothing more I can tell you,” my father said. “I don’t know what to do. If I did, don’t you think I would do it? For their sake and yours? But this web you’re in is completely outside my experience. It’s outside anything I’ve ever heard of. Johnny, this thing is like some ancient evil spirit. Something Our Lord might have cast out and sent into a pig. But I can’t cast out spirits, Johnny. I can only heal bodies. And as your poor sister proves, I’m not even very good at that.”
It was, I think, the greatest sorrow of my father’s life that he had strapped my sister to an orthopedic board to straighten her back when she was a baby. It had made her deformity worse. He lived with the idea that if he had done nothing, she would have been better off.
Perhaps that was why, now, he saw nothing to do.
We sat silently for a while. Without speaking, my father trimmed another cigar, gave it to me, and lit it.
We sat together in the smoky room, quiet and very close.
Then as our smokes were burning down to their ends, he said, “You don’t mean to take my advice, do you, Johnny?”
“I’m sorry, Father, I can’t,” I said.
“This creature, whatever it really is now, may be in the process of becoming something else. After all, a year or so ago it was only an image of your own yearning. It existed on a bit of canvas. Now it has a weird sort of quasi-existence in the minds of you and the Boit girls. Who knows what it may turn into?”
“All the more reason not to run away,” I said.
My father sighed deeply, rose, and found a red-bound volume in English titled Folkloric Beliefs of Old Europe.
“John, you are not being rational,” he said. “But nothing about this situation is rational. Therefore, I am giving you this book. It may provide you with something you can use.”
“I’ll be careful with it,” I promised as he handed it to me.
“Be careful with yourself,” he said.