FIRST DIBS/LAST WRIGHTS: Chapter Six

Rosemary and Hilda Go to a Kind of Church Where Surprises Lie and Secrets are Locked Away

(Above: A Richard Avedon photo from the International Center of Photography’s website. ICP titles it “Woman with Hair Flying in Air, Gift of Vince Aletti, 2005.”)

(Above: It is more precisely this photo of Janis Joplin which Avedon shot for the May 1968 issue of Vogue.)

[It has been a while since I posted a new chapter of this novel I am writing in installments here at SES/SUMS IT UP. I apologize to those of you who are reading it. I am still committed to getting this written and posting the chapters. But my traveling - this continuing pilgrimage - and all it entails interrupted my flow a bit.

I usually only release the first few paragraphs to all subscribers and the remaining is then for paid subscribers only, but since it has been a while I am going to published this one for everybody although if you haven’t been reading along you really won’t know what’s going on in this narrative about a small bohemian town on the Hudson River in upstate New York where supernatural things occur. A subscriber did write me recently: “I just finished reading all 5 chapters of First Dibs Last Wrights. QUITE the curveball at the end of chapter 5. Hope more is coming soon!!!! I’m HOOKED!!” I hope more of you will be, too. And even if she’s the only reader for this serial novel, I’m still committed to doing it.]

CHAPTER SIX

Rosemary and Hilda were uncomfortably sitting all by themselves on a back pew, their curiosity about finally having come inside this place after all these years not yet cushioning their discomfort at having agreed to do so. Rosemary had indeed been ready to back out of the deal she had struck with Asta and her husband, Horace, to attend Anna’s 16th birthday ritual in this cockamamie manmade church of theirs - a ritual called “A Cross Christening of Blood” which connoted to Rosemary a curious conflation of menstruation and ministration - but Hilda had convinced her she had to live up to her part of the bargain. “Plus, I’m the one with the better reason to refuse to show up in here after that man in front of everybody at your art opening called Lenny what he called him and then told him he ‘needed to get down on his knees and beg for forgiveness instead of what you’re usually up to, young man, when you’re down there kneeling and doing the devil’s work,’” said Hilda as they continued to discuss their actually having arrived inside the place as they waited for the service to begin. Hilda, a gifted mimic, had just expertly approximated Horace’s hoarse-like voice he often used to harangue and wound in his self-righteous rants around town that seemed oddly performative to Rosemary who couldn’t quite dispel the queasy feeling when she was around him that such eruptive rants - even the man’s off-putting put-upon righteousness - were ploys of some kind that she couldn’t quite place.

“Yeah. Kind of sorry you missed his head when you threw my thermos sculpture at him,” she said.

“Guess that was rather dramatic,” said Hilda. “But you know, Ro, how much I love a prop. And I’d already paid for it. It was already mine.”

“Sshshsh …” hissed a pew of women in front of them, all in identical red sweatshirts of some sort, who had been completely silent until the serpent-like sound issued from them in unison as if they were about to say the word that described how Rosemary and Hilda were feeling back here all alone on theirs: shunned.

Hilda grabbed Rosemary’s hand in horror at the hiss. “You’ve always been a bit too gestural, hon,” whispered Rosemary, and then the two of them - as if they were petticoated little girls in church instead of sporting the vintage 1970s Gucci that Hilda had hauled from her closet, Rosemary wearing a man’s brown size 52 suede jacket with Gucci insignia buttons that had belonged to Hilda’s husband and Hilda herself donning a forest green suede overcoat with a big pointed collar and buttons made of red and blue enamel which she nervously fingered with her other hand - stifled the patronizing giggles gurgling forth for the petty bourgeois all about them. That was the term (with an emphasis on its first word) that had surfaced for Rosemary as they had entered the sanctuary - petty bourgeois - as she next noticed how wrongly dressed she and Hilda were since everybody else had come wearing something red. “It’s the fucking Red Sea come to life,” she’d said to an already horrified Hilda as they had taken their seats.

“Not Gucci types is my guess,” Hilda had said. The ceremony they were here to attend was stalled because Anna and Dibs and Lenny hadn’t shown up yet and Rosemary, checking her watch, was wondering if they could still possibly be practicing the number they were going to spring on the congregation since Anna was required to sing a song of some sort as part of this religious “Sweet Sixteen” ritual that her parents’ church insisted upon. The three of them had tried out the idea on Hilda and her and though the two had their reservations, they told them to go ahead and do it since Hilda thought Lenny’s seeking revenge on Reverend Horace Wright was a sign of life in him, some gumption, a bit of grown-up grit.

Rosemary and Hilda - “Gucci'd to the gills,” is how Lenny had described them earlier - now quieted momentarily and looked around at the pews filled with a rainbow of reds and realized they really didn’t know many of the congregants. Where had they come from? Rosemary did notice sitting up three pews in front of her a teacher or two from the school and a pharmacist who had once filled a few of her prescriptions. “Who are these people?” Hilda whispered, giving them all a perfunctory once-over the way she could a layout in her art department during her fashion editor days when spotting an out-place-cuff in a fashion spread or the wrong cropping for an actress who needed more cheek - something Hilda never lacked. “They look like farmers out of a Grant Wood painting who have never heard of Grant Wood. No. I take that back,” she continued to whisper. “They look like actors cast to play farmers. There is something off about them because they are too on-the-nose. Look,” she said, nodding toward the farthest pew. “That man has on red overalls. That’s a fashion statement I’ve never seen and I thought I’d seen them all. Where the fuck are we, Rosemary.”

“You insisted, hon,” said Rosemary.

Hilda continued to look around - she was curious about the padlock on the basement door - but was now trying to find a prop she might weaponize and wield if she were going to need it later. The only thing close-by was a lone, very large empty candlestick with what appeared to be black wax not entirely cleaned from the large windowsill where it prominently stood as if the sill had been built for it. It oddly - and somehow troublingly - reminded her of the blackened sort of wax she’d noticed in Horace’s ears when he was ranting at Lenny the other night at the art opening that served as well as Dibs and Anna’s 16th birthday party. That was a habit of Hilda’s, noticing the cleanliness of the insides of a person’s ears. Clean ears were her pet peeve. She was known to have left boxes of Q-Tips in the desk drawers of her staff during her magazine days. And Horace’s ears - she was appalled when she spotted it - seemed caked with lots and lots of black wax. It had both disgusted and puzzled her, so much so that she’d forgotten to mention it to Rosemary she was so determined to push it from her mind. But now she made a mental note to do so after whatever was about to transpire in this church or cult or whatever this was outfitted with pews and absent candles that had left their black wax behind. Hilda had attended some rather outrageously staged fashion shows in her heyday as an editor - and sat on front rows not on back pews - but she’d never had a feeling like she was having about all this, a foreboding that could not be attributed to the use of too much fur or the wrong cut of mistakenly chosen fabric. She kept thinking these faux farmers might hoist a fur-laden animal to sacrifice upon the altar where they had fabricated rituals to put constructs around the fabrications upon which all religions rely. That was what was cut across her own bias - Hilda was an atheist, her only deities Dior and, for a few dark years in the 1980s, Donna Karan - this foreboding that something was about to be butchered and bloodied in some sort of warped blessing for a teenage girl.

“You think I can reach that candlestick if I need to protect us against this bunch at some point?” she asked Rosemary.

“Your paranoidal anger needs to be less gestural, hon,” Rosemary told her. “It would be more effective if it were less … well … targeted. Your throwing my piece of art at Horace the other night made it about you. Horace became the victim. Don’t throw that candlestick at him, too. What is that thing anyway?” Rosemary wondered, now eyeing it herself, curious about its sculptural aspects. “Is it made of lacquered wood - are those uprooted roots- and antlers and maybe some sort of moss?”

“It looks like pubic hair,” said Hilda.

Rosemary was about to roll her eyes and tell her friend to quiet down, but then she too saw the similarity. “God, hon, you’re right,” she said. “It does look like a bunch of shaved pubic hair now that you mention it.”

“God, Ro, do you think it could be Anna’s?” asked Hilda. “Is that part of this gang’s ‘Sweet Sixteen’ ritual? I wouldn’t put anything past this bunch. I keep thinking they’re going to kill a cat or something. Did you check on Callie before we left?”

“Shshshsh,” shushed Rosemary as Asta, all aflutter, arrived at their pew.

“Have you seen Anna and the other two?” she asked, using the phrase she so often used for Lenny and Dibs.

“We left them at my house getting dressed,” said Rosemary. “They’ll be here any minute I’m sure.”

“Hmmm,” said Asta. “Well, we’re running late and Horace is ready to get this started. The congregation is getting restless.”

Rosemary and Hilda looked around the pews; the Red Sea did seem to be in a bit of a roil.

Horace stood now at the pulpit. He banged his hand thunderously upon it three times. A pause. Then twice more. He was a big man, around 6 feet 3 inches in Rosemary’s estimation, as she looked at him in his red robe. Asta skittered back up the row to his side and put hers on which was waiting draped over a throne-like chair.

“That little thing,” whispered Hilda as she watched Asta flutter about, “looks like something you could use to top off a fascinator.”

Rosemary stifled a laugh.

The red sweatshirts turned and silently stared and this time she noticed they were all wearing the same shade of lipstick, the reddest she’d ever seen.

“We are going to begin,” Horace thundered, silencing them all. “If we begin, Anna will arrive. These are The Commandments …”

At that, just as he predicted but before he could bellow whatever The Commandments were, the back door swung open and in marched Anna and Dibs and Lenny dressed again as they were at Dibs’s come-as-your-favorite-rock-star birthday party - Dibs as Jimi Hendrix, Lenny as Jim Morrison, and Anna as Janis Joplin. Lenny carried a tape recorder. Anna had a tape in her hand. Dibs had her father’s old electric guitar strapped to her chest.

The Red Sea roiled even more.

Asta began to say something in protest but Horace put his hand on her arm and clutched it. She silenced, grimacing at his hold. There was cruelty in it. The Red Sea saw the grimace, sensed the cruelty. At first it seemed to thrill at both, then calmed, as if a couple of waves had gone through it.

Anna and The Other Two - which would be a good name for this little band, Rosemary bemusedly thought - stood at the front of the congregation. Horace nodded to a white-robed attendant who didn’t look much older than Anna. Hilda wondered if maybe she had been the last girl to go through this same ritual. The robed girl came back and got the gigantic candlestick on the specially built window sill. When she got back to the altar, Horace and Asta reached under the pulpit and withdrew a giant black candle to place in it. Anna lit it. Horace and Asta each dipped a finger in the melting wax and placed a bit of it in Anna’s ears.

“What the fuck,” whispered Hilda.

Rosemary: “ … shshshsh ...”

Horace nodded at Lenny as if he were in on this and it dawned on Hilda that maybe this performance about to take place had been Horace’s idea, not Lenny’s. But she remained quiet as she took it all in - her foreboding giving way to curiosity but it was all still creeping her out. Dibs looked back at her grandmother and Rosemary saw something in the look, and gasped. She reached for Hilda’s hand again as she earlier had in horror but this time there was a kind of heightened anticipation in her. Hilda could have sworn she felt her friend begin to vibrate in the pew next to her, and then the pew itself began to echo it.

Anna handed the tape to Lenny who put it in the recorder. Suddenly rock music filled the church. Lenny and Anna and Dibs, who was strumming at the guitar, began to lip-synch the lyrics:

“Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man's soul and faith
And I was 'round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate

Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name
But what's puzzlin' you is the nature of my game …”

Hilda turned to Rosemary and whispered, “What’s going on? They told us they were going to sing ‘Riders on the Storm.’ That’s what they were rehearsing when we left. That’s what we all agreed to.”

Rosemary clutched Hilda’s hand tighter. Horace clutched Asta’s arm. The Red Sea rose in unison; it swayed.

This was a song - was it the Rolling Stones? - that Rosemary’s daughter and son-in-law had covered in their rock band. The tape was of them rehearsing it when they were in college. Their voices filled the church as Lenny and Anna and Dibs pretended to be singing.

Tears began to roll down Rosemary’s face. She kept wiping them away because she didn’t want to stain the suede of her Gucci jacket.

“Look at Anna,” whispered an astonished Hilda. “Look at her. She is sort of transforming before our eyes. She looks like that Avedon portrait of Joplin in Vogue back in the 1960s, the first time she appeared in the magazine. When Anna throws her head back and her hair flies about - there, that - she looks just like her.”

The voices of the Stones were now somehow changing. Something didn’t sound quite right - or, more precisely, all too right - because Rosemary recognized what she was beginning to hear. It was again the sound of the combined voices of Pan and Lucifer who had appeared together in her living room when Dibs was still a toddler, the sound she had been waiting to return once more. Dibs was finally again channeling them. Lenny and Anna stopped moving their mouths and turned to stare at her. The Red Sea calmed, not knowing whether to be appalled or entranced. All was silent and still except for Dibs who turned to face Horace and Asta, the only ones who could see her face and what they saw made them hold on to each other so they wouldn’t collapse in fits, “The Fall of Seizures” as Horace would have said if he had begun reciting his Commandments. Or kneel. Or regurgitate all human matter. The sound of three thunderous bangs on the pulpit echoed in the church. A pause. And then two more. But no hand - certainly not Horace’s humanly formed one - had pounded on it. The lock on the door leading to the basement began to rattle. Lenny touched the copy of the key to it that he now kept in his pocket. All the other congregants felt their copies in theirs. Horace and Asta together held theirs aloft.

With his other hand, Lenny kept pushing the off button on the tape recorder but Dibs, turning back to the congregation, continued lip-synching to the combined voice coming from her. Her Jimi Hendrix boots were hoofed now. She sang:

“Just as every cop is a criminal
And all the sinners saints
As heads is tails, just call me Lucifer
'Cause I'm in need of some restraint
So if you meet me, have some courtesy
Have some sympathy and some taste
Use all your well-learned politesse
Or I'll lay your soul to waste
Mmm, yeah …

Pleased to meet you, hope you guessed my name …”

And then just as suddenly the voices returned to Dibs’s dead parents singing again from their college days. The boots too, unhoofed, were boots again.

Anna picked up the candlestick with the black candle still in it. She held it aloft like her parents were holding their key aloft. She felt the black wax inside her ears heating up.

“What the fuck,” said Hilda again as she looked around to see that black wax was streaming from all the ears of all the members of the congregation, the Red Sea blackening. It was streaming from Horace’s and Asta’s. It was streaming now from Anna’s. It was streaming from Lenny’s. The only three people from whom the black wax didn’t flow were the two women and Dibs.

“Rosemary, what is going on. I am truly frightened," she said. “I want to leave - but not without Lenny. I can’t leave without Lenny.”

Rosemary held her friend’s hand tighter. “Don’t move,” she said.

They watched Lenny go to the basement door and unlock it.

He and Anna and Horace and Asta and all of those who made up the Red Sea headed down below.

Dibs turned off the tape recorder and came to the back of the church to sit with Hilda and Rosemary.

Rosemary put her arm around her granddaughter.

Hilda started to get up to retrieve her son. “Not yet,” Rosemary told her, not letting go of her hand. “Stay still. There’s a plan. We’ll get him back.”

“Back from where?” asked Hilda.

“Do I tell her?” Rosemary asked Dibs.

Dibs there on the pew next to them melted into Callie and then ascended back into Dibs. “I guess you just told her yourselves,” said Rosemary.

“What the fuck,” said Hilda. “Rosemary what is going on? I am scared to death.”

“You are now part of the plan,” said Rosemary. “Stay calm.”

Hilda began to cry.

“Don’t stain your Gucci,” said Rosemary.

Dibs hit the play button on the tape recorder. The voices of her dead parents filled the sanctuary:

“Ooh-hoo, ooh-hoo, ooh-hoo
All right
Ooh-hoo-hoo, ooh-hoo-hoo, ooh-hoo-hoo
Ah yeah
Ooh-hoo-hoo, ooh-hoo-hoo
Ah, yes, what's my name?”

Then the voices changed again to the other two:

“Tell me, baby, ah what's my name?
Tell me, sweetie, what's my name?
Ooh-hoo-hoo, ooh-hoo-hoo, ooh-hoo-hoo, ooh-hoo-hoo
Ooh-hoo-hoo, ooh-hoo-hoo, ooh-hoo-hoo
Ah, yeah
What's my name?”

“Lenny,” whispered Hilda staring at the basement door.

“You haven’t lost him,” said Rosemary. “He’s in on this. So is Anna. I’ll explain.”

Dibs melting into Callie climbed into Hilda’s lamp.

Hilda fainted.

Rosemary sang along with The Other Two.