overflowing gallery. The longer Jack did not offer the help for which I refused to ask, the more my resentment grew. When I could no longer contain it, I stormed her shop and demanded, without so much as a hello, that she do something.
“What do you expect
“That’s it?” I said. “You’re making your fat commission, and that’s all you’ve got to say?”
“Christ, you’re a prick.” Jack jabbed me in the shoulder with the pen she was holding. “Is she taking her medicine?”
I explained that I had tried to mix it into her coffee crystals but she had figured out the deceit. She had marched up to the belfry and launched the jar past my head, shattering it against the wall. “Do you know how hard it is to get coffee crystals out of a bookshelf?”
Jack nodded. “The one time I tried to sneak her medicine into her, she wouldn’t speak to me for three months. Thought I was part of the plot against her.”
It calmed me somewhat to hear that Jack had tried the same trick that I had. We ended our conversation with moderate civility, and Jack promised to come by the fortress that evening.
She brought food that Marianne Engel would be able to see was not stuffed with drugs-bread, fruit, cheese, and so on-and tried to engage her in conversation. It didn’t work. Marianne Engel was angry at us for interrupting her; she stood breaking the bread into little pieces that she dropped among the rock chips on the floor, then turned up the stereo until it drove us away. Climbing the stairs, we could hear her talking to herself excitedly in Latin.
Though we’d accomplished absolutely nothing, the effort had drained us. Jack and I sat silently in the living room for a quarter hour, barely looking up from the floor. I finally realized it was not that Jack didn’t care, but simply that she-having been through this before-really did know that there was nothing either of us could do. Still, as she left, Jack said, “I’ll be back tomorrow.”
In the morning, I found Marianne Engel sprawled over newly completed statue 17. I hooked an arm around her and she didn’t have the strength to pull away from me despite her best efforts. “No, I have to prepare for the next one.” She meant it but she simply couldn’t resist me, and I helped her up the stairs.
Once again I rinsed the dust, sweat, and blood from her body, while her head lolled around the tub’s porcelain rim as if she were a marionette whose puppet master was on a break. She kept telling me, all through the washing and even as I was putting her into bed, that she needed to return to her workshop. But within seconds of hitting the sheets, she fell asleep.
Marianne Engel was still unconscious when Jack arrived that evening. Finding myself alone with Ms. Meredith again, I spun the cap off a new bottle of bourbon.
Jack told me about the customers who purchased gargoyles. The names were impressive: prominent businessmen, heads of state, noted patrons of the arts, as well as a Who’s Who of the entertainment business. I recognized a number of chart-topping musicians and A-list Hollywood actors, as well as one writer who is almost universally recognized as the king of the horror genre. One director, known for his highly poetic films about outcasts, had purchased at least half a dozen works. (With his mop of wild dark hair and gaunt face, he could easily have been mistaken for Marianne Engel’s anemic half brother.) While I was not surprised to discover that a number of churches bought her gargoyles, I was caught unawares at how many universities were also major clients.
Jack ate most of the Chinese food that we ordered in, washing it down with glass after glass of bourbon. She wiped the sauce from around her mouth with the back of her sleeve and asked whether my penis was really gone. When I confirmed it was, she apologized for joking about the fact earlier. I accepted her apology with as much grace as I could muster and she got a little weepy at this point; I was discovering that alcohol-as it often does with even the manliest of drinkers-tended to make her sentimental. When I asked Jack whether she was planning anything for Christmas, she basically answered by reciting her life’s story.
She had become pregnant while still in her teens and had given birth to a boy, Ted, who was now in his thirties. Jack married Ted’s father, who proved violent and constantly drunken, and she stayed with him only because there didn’t seem to be any other option. She’d managed to finish high school, but college was out of the question. When Jack got pregnant a second time, her husband blamed her for trying to wreck his life: “You go get knocked up again, even though we got no money. Bitch!” Ted, six at the time, watched his father beat his child- heavy mother at least once a week throughout the pregnancy.
On an evening in Jack’s seventh month, her husband administered a particularly heavy beating. When he passed out from the alcohol, Jack packed a few small bags of clothing and bundled up young Ted. She placed the boy by the front door and then returned to the bedroom with a frying pan, which she used to bash her sleeping husband in the head. Jack claimed that she did this to ensure he didn’t wake up and give chase, but I suspect it was mostly because it felt good. For days, she said, she scanned the local paper to see if she’d killed him. When no obituary turned up, she was mostly relieved but also slightly disappointed.
“After I left my husband, I was sometimes worried that he’d be waiting at my mother’s hospital. She had schizophrenia,” Jack said. “But I never saw the bastard again. Wasn’t motivated enough to be a stalker, I guess.”
It was a revelation that Jack’s mother had been schizophrenic. Was there a connection, then, to Marianne Engel? Indeed there was.
“I loved my mother and I had to visit her, especially since no one else did. My father was long gone. I suppose he couldn’t stand watching the woman he loved go crazy.”
I made some small comment that her life sounded as though it had been difficult.
“Damn straight. All the men in my life have been such shits that while Ted was growing up,” Jack confided, “I secretly wished that he’d turn out gay.”
“And?”
“No such luck,” she grumbled, refilling her bourbon.
“Well, don’t give up hope,” I said, trying to be helpful.
“Yeah, whatever.” She took another large sip. “Anyway, things were pretty difficult but we got by. Gave birth to Tammie, that’s the kid I had inside me when I left my husband. Got a job as a waitress. Moved up to cook, then assistant manager. Crappy little greasy spoon, but what can you do? Some lawyer tracked me down after my father died, and he’d left me a bit of money. So I guess the bastard was good for something, after all.” She held up her glass towards heaven. “I knew I couldn’t raise two kids with what I was making in that restaurant, so I used some of that money to enroll in a night course, accounting. Got decent grades, and was able to get a bad position with a good company.”
“That’s still a long way away from being a gallery owner,” I noted, “and Marianne’s agent.”
“Not as far as you might think. I kept visiting my mom in the hospital and one day I noticed a new patient, a young girl. Attractive, you know, sitting alone at a table. Drawing. She was different from the others. Maybe it was the hair and eyes.”
“Marianne,” I said.
“Bingo,” Jack said. “Except she didn’t have that name back then. She was a Jane Doe who the police had found on the streets. Marianne Engel is just what she asked the doctors to start calling her one day.”
“The nurse told me she had been found with no identification, and fingerprints turned up nothing. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, tell them anything about her past. Maybe her parents were dead or maybe they just abandoned her, who knows? Anyway, after a few visits, I decided to say hello. She was shy, then. When I asked her to show me her drawings, she wouldn’t. But I kept asking and, after a few more visits, she finally did. I was blown away. I’d expected incoherent doodles and all that, but here were fantastic beasts, monsters, and they were
