Witchcraft

The Carpenter's Song

That same day designated by his landlady to see to a ceiling repair, he arrived home early. An unattached tile had jarred others loose. Added weight of his curious cat caused three tiles to drop. In fact, the previous morning told the tale.

The cat had unexpectedly appeared inside after being let out the night before. On the floor lay ceiling tiles bearing long claw marks across them. But even that had not prepared him for the carpenter.

Pushing open the door, he had expected Stanley, the man occasionally hired for small carpentry jobs. The sole reason he recalled Stanley’s name, was that it was the most common brand of hammer and screwdriver found in hardware stores. Stepping around the door, he stumbled on the unseen drop sheet and seeing two women in his apartment, tried to look nonchalant.

“I’m Mary,” the first one smiled, nodding to him.

Mary had been a speech therapist’s assistant, now serving as carpenter’s assistant. He quietly wondered whether Mary would go through her life as assistant to everyone she met or loved.

The shorter of the two turned to him and, to his astonishment, sported twenty reddish-brown whiskers of three inches in length, from her chin. As artfully as he could, he tried to conceal shock at meeting such a carpenter with such a beard. Now, to keep from attributing to him the wrong outlook, Theresa had done a competent job installing a sheet rock ceiling and painting it. It became infinitely more comfortable and safer, both for him and the bewildered cat who after that, stayed clear of the attic.

He accepted the fact that Mary was Theresa’s assistant lover and that the loving couple had bought a home in Fairhaven for seventeen thousand. A friend told him later that Theresa also performed women’s music.

But there was nothing unusual about singing carpenters with beards, and he had to ponder what so amused him about the scene.

He knew he would meet them again, but not when or how, a sort of reversed but expectant déjà vu.

* * *

The time Banning didn’t spend trying to remember, he spent trying to forget.

His days were filled with lapses of memory, his nights, lapses of forgetfulness. The pressure of new challenges at the laboratory kept him moving, from the moment he arrived in early morning. So hectic were some days that his embattled mind-set continued late into the evening and some nights, into the following dreams.

Curious that this memory he might have marveled over, if a moment’s reflection had been available.

Facts that he considered irrelevant, he had great trouble recalling. However, if something captured his imagination, memory was near perfect, even decades later.

He returned to favored thoughts gladly and often, and the habits of one lady in particular that so captivated him. With her, embarrassing circumstances were left as if they had never occurred. If it were a fault, he might be accused of looking too far into the past, and too far into the future, unlike his friend Big Mike, for whom nothing but the present seemed to exist.

It was blessing and curse to live as he did, with always an eye to where he was headed given the confidence of a backward glance. No early career goal remained elusive, and as he moved ahead, there were reassessments.

There was Susan; there was the writing of her.

These were understandably intertwined; if he had married Susan, the book would have been unnecessary. Since he hadn’t, he would live proving to himself that she had been misguided to leave him. Although he had not seen her in eight years, the memory of the anger and dull ache would recur in dreams, as the spirit that prodded him onwards. By not giving herself, she had unwittingly given him that which was more valuable and enduring.

In loss, he found strength.

* * *

On Sundays, the least busy of the week, Banning, who had no access to laundry at the carriage house, bundled up each week’s worth early for a laundromat on nearby Whalley Avenue.

“Don’t I know you?” a voice from behind startled him: he had thought he was alone with the hum of dryers abandoned by the few Sunday morning customers fetching coffee at nearby Whalley Diner.

He turned to face a slender, befreckled redhead whom he recognized, a neighbor from Maple Street he had occasionally seen sitting on her porch across the street.

“Don’t believe we’ve met,” Banning spoke over his shoulder digging things out from the warmth of the dryer.

She introduced herself in a reserved way any suspicious woman of her age might.

“…not at Church today?”

“Haven’t been in years. Anyway, good to meet you.”

On the way home, he reviewed their conversation in his imagination.

She was a wedding celebrant, or had aspirations in that direction, and had studied comparative religions and philosophy at Albertus Magnus College.

“That’s not far from the Tower: St. Ronan Street, is it?” he has asked her.

“Prospect Hill…” she had replied.

“We’ll have to talk more sometime, seeing as you live across the street…”

* * *

Some nights before, Banning had procured a stack of books on genealogy from the university library, especially those suggesting emotional or mental infirmity. For a human geneticist, hereditary status among witches might also be intriguing. The Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692, likewise, had held a certain fascination for him since his trip to Cape Cod in September. Modern Wiccan worship was barely thirty years old in America. Yet, there was a prior history and an association with abnormal psychiatry.

He could not draw an orthogonal line between the late seventeenth century and the final two decades of the twentieth, but witches seemed to lurk at least once a year, in the imagination of small children and the occasional postdoctoral fellow.

Nights before his vacation weekend at the Cape, he had mused over details used by others to give the story about spirits color, and further pondered what he read in genealogies of odd family members better forgotten. The pile of books promised substance from which his inclination to learn about ghosts might benefit. Something illogical, something anti-technological, something rising from deep within the modern soul despite education and training to snuff out fancy and fantasy.

Other than the genre of Ghost Story in fiction, and he chose to study the Salem trials as his work science research schedule might allow.

* * *

A woman fast becoming his favorite had mentioned ancestors in Salem early. As part of his gothic ponderings that October, his poorly known family roots in seventeenth century Duxbury, Massachusetts, suggested the possibility that members of the two kindreds were personally acquainted.

Too romantic, he scoffed to himself, yet read on without lessening the pace of his interest. He had jokingly told her that her ancestors were probably burned at Salem, if they were anything like her. She too, laughed at this offhanded comment.

Women, Banning knew, were by nature mysterious, and the dark side of human nature sprang from infantile fears of women who presided over life. Every newborn was invested with instinctive hope that the eyes that so closely peer into his own, have none but good intent. There was a special terror to find otherwise at any subsequent age.

Not only women, but scientists were regarded as somewhat mysterious.

Both he and his girlfriend realized that as research students, they would often be regarded eccentric at best by friends in other lines of work. However, he reassured himself, if there were one to appreciate eccentricity, it would be her.

The night before, with books strewn across his comforter and on the floor, and a candle lit for effect, the chill of the October cooperated in creating a mood: wind nipped at the casement as he read.

Moodiness, he had read, was key to setting tone in a ghost tale.

* * *

It was a fascinating and well-situated behind a Victorian era residence, this old carriage house, and more elaborate than most. In architectural character, and its possibly lingering spiritual possession by former inhabitants, the place soothed him in a way more modern construction could not.

Dr. Peter Banning had no small shock that evening when the account of one certain Sarah Goode came to his attention, one of the first to be hanged at Salem for witchcraft.

A William Banning of Andover, he read, had also confessed in those early colonial deliberations of a local magistrate with only English law as precedent. This jolted Banning. At that time in the history of Massachusetts Colony, there were few of his surname, and of those, most were related and in his lineage.

Suddenly, the joke made weeks before, while dining on swordfish in a cozy Duxbury restaurant, returned to trouble him. Had an earlier Banning been hanged or burned, or had the early testimony jeopardized the life of an innocent maid named Sarah Goode?

A plot for Banning’s Halloween tale began to emerge from his inexplicable obsession, provoked by books brought home.

The earlier Banning’s confession, from David Nevring’s report entitled Confession and Truths at Salem, had been recorded:

The Lord God hath commanded me to Confess to all present, of my grievous Transgression, Sin and Apostasy in that failing ,in placing my hand on the Devil’s book as he appeared unto me as a Black, to my shame and eternal damnation. He vouchsafed to me I should gain all by so acting. At Salem Village, there being a short distance from the Meeting House, some eighty Blades and those with Rapiers by their belts, which was called for aught I know by the witch Bishop and her Burroughs, and the Trump rang out and unleavened bread and strong wine which they called Sacrament, but none was offered me; being carried above the assembly, heads on a stick.

I being with Cart a Saturday last, all the day, of wheat and corn, the demon brought my shade to Salem, and did pinch and prod with sharpened Needles M.S. and R.F. by forcing and clutching mine own hand. A Sabbath Day my Shade did afflict M.S. and A.M. with clutching about the Neck. And the design was to destroy Salem Village, beginning at Minister’s House, and to ruine the House of God, and to set up Satan in his stead, then all will be Well.

But now I pray my God make me sensible of my ruinous Designs , my Transgressions, Sin and Apostasy begging his Pardon, and of the Honorable Magistrates and all God’s people, hoping and promising by the mercy of Him, to bend my Heart and Hand to the greatness of God, humbly begging prayers of all God’s good stewards that I might walk under this great affliction and that I may by good works and honest heart procure the sure mercies of David and the blessings of Abraham.

When Banting had finished the history, a notion of creating his own ghost story emerged, its plot remained diffuse and he put it away, imagining how his own family might react if it were published, not that any understood his scientific work or motivations.

* * *

CHAPTER 7.

“Your father was an architect?” asked David, a medical genetics friend from Banning’s unfortunate first year at the School of Medicine.

“Yes: Upstate New York. Trained at Cornell. He did small churches and private residences,” replied Banning casually looking around David’s recently purchased but largely unfurnished apartment. “Why?”

“Do you know what Commandment Boards are?” David asked, showing depth to his architectural history, at least more than the usual pediatric medical doc in training.

“Sounds like I should but I’ve not been in church for years. David, if you don’t mind my asking, you’re Jewish. Why such interest in Colonial churches?”

“Why Banning, this is New Haven, remember? What they have here goes far back, and we might as well see what’s to see while we’re here…”

“Meaning?”

“I’ll give you a call sometime before I go over, if you’re interested. They are located on The Green”

Here was an interesting, maybe even amusing, diversion he had not considered.

“Sure: call me…”

* * *

During his off hours, he looked ahead to Halloween that year: his girlfriend had a birthday and would be bound to visit. But it was Halloween the previous year that had been odd in a way he could not fully describe.

The holiday had both secular and religious roots as the Celtic festival and celebration Samhain in Ireland, a night on which departed souls returned to the fields and meadows of their old haunts. There was something in this, the way Banting was himself attached to the fields near his childhood home, although once departed for college years back, he had not returned.

Halloween the previous year, and before the robbery and assault that occasioned his move across campus from the School of Medicine, had been spent in New Haven with his Bethesda friend visiting.

Natalie, a pediatrician and likewise a postdoc Fellow in Human Genetics, had invited the couple to a Halloween party held by a friend of hers on the Psychiatry Staff.

It turned out one of the most bizarre nights of his life.

“Nat mentioned your interest in feminism…and witchcraft,” one had casually approached him at the party while his girlfriend was chatting in a dark corner.

“No; well, yes. I am a biologist, not a cultural anthropologist, but yes, there seems to be a longstanding tradition of bigotry against scientists as sorcerers early on, at least in old Europe. It is that angle, the arcane and eccentric scientist that others view with suspicion, that interests me...”

“You suggesting it was different here in America?”

“Well, certainly, basic science had always attracted a certain, you know, odd sort, perhaps less sociable than most, cooped up with books and formulae. At least that seems to be the narrative pushed by Hollywood…”

“Actually, I’m interested in film history, myself…”

“Good; perhaps you can fill me in sometime…now, please excuse me,” was Banting’s parting comment as he threaded through the costumed crowd, almost unable to hear himself think amid the blaring music and flashing strobe lights. It had been just that sort of strobe that some were sensitive to; in others, epileptic fits resulted.

“Natalie, look, I know these, some of them are friends, but are these people normal?” he asked and was shot an amused glance in return, her face shadowed and colored by the light show. She had not disagreed: it seemed to amuse her.

Psychodrama.

Someone near him had uttered this as a shout in approval of the way the party was trending.

The most notable among those arriving in costume, was one who was arrayed, left side male, right side female. As the curious type he was, Banting was always interested in what costumes various personalities chose, and why, and what their choice to dress outside their normal identity, revealed.

He and his girlfriend had pleaded fatigue and had ended up leaving as the psychiatric Halloween celebration seemed to drift in an unpleasant direction. As he looked back over his shoulder, the image of a fire lit tribal night in some uncivilized landscape passed briefly. Perhaps if he had known these psychiatric professionals a little better, he might have been less unsettled as the party got wilder.

Much later, a year in fact, he briefly recalled that party and the stereotype that those who chose counseling and abnormal psychiatry as careers, had issues others did not share.

* * *

Sunday, October 10^th found Dr. Peter Banning, Fellow, Muscular Dystrophy Association, Department of Biology, Yale University, New Haven, huddled beneath the covers with a fan blowing forty-five degree air into his efficiency apartment.

That upper room in a nineteenth century carriage house on Maple Street was charming, and he felt fortunate to have found it not far from campus, off Whalley Avenue north of the undergraduate campus and New Haven Green.

Although all the amenities needed by a Fellow were within easy reach, there were unsettling rumors that the neighborhood was no safer than the hostile, barren streets he had abandoned nearer the School of Medicine a year earlier.

An adverse feature was that the direct, as-the-crow-flies route to his new position at Kline Biology Tower, ran through a rough section, as bad as that near the hospital and in some ways worse. His usual detour whether he walked or drove, took him into town, then a sharp turn to Kline Biology Tower.

St. Ronan’s was the crest line street of large Victorian Mansions, of privilege and private wealth. However, just a block or two down their backside in the direction he might travel if the shortest route home were considered, were industrial areas and a few factories so vulnerable that parking lots were often surrounded with high chain link topped with razor wire.

* * *

He opened his eyes, aware of the brightness of the room with the beatific grin of a cat staring him in the face. He would find this feline habit endearing, and rolled over to face the window. Beyond the reds and yellows of the Connecticut autumn, a cheerful and promising Wedgewood-hued sky shone beyond such skyline as he could see peeking out from the overhang of the old roof.

The light wind and morning sun completed this window view and landscape portrait. Now, he glanced out the northern windows, the spruce, elm and black cherry remained still verdant as the pots of Christmas cactus on the window shelf. It was a new day, and although last Sunday’s New York Times lay untouched by his bedside, curiosity would move him to newsstands again, for the latest news.

He threw back the covers and strode naked into the bathroom.

The past week’s weight work had begun to show an effect by scales and the mirror. The weekend before he had flown to San Diego, and had gained ten pounds. At any other age, it might not have bothered him.

At thirty-one, with any sign of illness or lassitude, he immediately would assume to be stigmata of incipient old age, decrepitude and death. At twenty-five, he had jogged every morning at San Pedro High School overlooking Los Angeles Harbor as the sun came up, more as an exercise in will or philosophy than need. By age thirty, there was a certain pressure and panic in his hurried moves to snap off a hundred, then two hundred sit-ups.

Young men don’t slide easily into middle age, nor do they part with the exuberant, athletic strength of their youth. Banning was surprised when ten pounds disappeared in a week of hard exercise and dieting, and dismayed his abdomen, despite its hundred sit-ups, could still boast persistent belly.

That night, Banning thought with no small satisfaction, how anyone might write the inevitable intimate scene for a novel. He thought of his girlfriend who had visited recently and what they had done with their spare time. He could excuse such obsessions as a biologist.

For a moment, he thought of a set of chromosomes, his own, neatly aligned with their partners in a scheme known as a karyotype, neatly paired as if for an annual physical. But for Banting, each pair seemed to subtend a separate subcellular wedding. Without expertise, it was hard to know which member of each pair came from his father, and which from his mother.

Except.

Yes, except.

The sex chromosomes, X and Y, were obviously different, as different as a naked man and his naked girlfriend, call them Adam and Eve.

He could imagine his own sex chromosomes, in each and every cell of his body, arguing. The X was his mother, the Y, his father. That there might be disharmony in each and every cell, for better or for worse, in sickness and in health, was obvious. So much better if they got along, at least well enough to avoid distracting him.

Of course, such things were very real, not fantasy, to a postdoctoral biologist.

Overall, however, he loved her very DNA, this woman he found himself thinking of as the embodiment of human creation and his hope for a happy future. Whether their antecedents had known each other at Salem centuries earlier or not, she was the one.

Thus were Banning’s musings on witchcraft and sex as it is portrayed in the written word, not at the cell level, but at the panting, urgent, desirous level of experience.

Yes, it might be a dirty joke as written. In the words of someone whom he’d forgotten, the only difference between pornography and art was words: the action and rhythms were identical.

If too explicit, he reasoned, a disservice excluding the reader’s own experience via his imagination, was done. Without a reader’s imagination, it is just another love scene, another meat on meat that interests only the perverted. Now in order to transcend the implication, the writer must be implicit and allow full participation of the reader. So, by implicitly encouraging through phrases and cues, the reader’s imagination worked to the benefit its ingenious author.

Or something: he was at that stage in his life, a reader, not a writer, but his best thoughts and inspiration had evolved in a realm that anyone untrained in biology, would wholly miss.

What they did not realize was that any man with parents, knew something about the biology of sex, and any man who had become a father, was an experimental biologist of the most profound sort.

* * *

Banning was amused with the origins and writing of ghost tales that evening, and had concluded that it must follow the classic, time-honored format provided by a long literary and cultural history, best informed by the folktales collected by the Grimm Brothers’ Märchen (Folktales, 1812).

The writers list in English had dealt with ghosts was impressive: Shakespeare; Dickens; Washington Irving; Poe; Henry James...

Ghosts were a universal cultural invention, and had always been. It was the fundamental unease with the concept of one’s own death, that struggled to fabricate tales of explanation.

In that work, stereotypic themes appeared in unadorned format, anticipated earlier in written testimony taken at colonial Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. These included bewitchment and enchantment of innocent children; children who were often accorded the power to accuse any adults they pleased of witchcraft by claiming maltreatment by defendants; pinching, prodding with needles, and death threats if the children were to reveal what they claim was done to them. Children especially as victims of evil adult actions by those not their legal or biological parents, it appeared, were essential.

The witch as type-cast character, had stereotypic physical and behavioral stigmata, including mental, emotional or temperamental insufficiencies and certain preternatural bodily markings or colorations especially in areas of the body not publicly displayed. Boldness, eccentricity, solitary mumblings in absence of nearby hearers in conversations, and personal activities at unusual hours of the day or night, were behavioral traits arousing public suspicion. A set of criteria, Banning noted, that might well describe most of his associates among the Fellows.

The witches of fable were often ancient, unattractive and in material want, although women at the opposite end of the spectrum in all regards were hardly exempt. Among the biologically-based societal mishaps of uncertain etiology or causation in early societies that might point to witchcraft, especially absent an obvious causation, were miscarriages, crop failures, livestock miscarriages or deaths, and epidemics of contagion.

In this case, Banning observed, witchcraft was often linked to occult science, following the long cultural tradition that men and women of science, as well as early physicians, appeared as evil or good sorcerers and shamans in native cultures. The less a natural phenomenon was understood by the public, the more likely witchcraft had been invoked as a causal agent at a time when education was rare.

For Banning, considerations flew through his curious mind, included meteorology and astronomical events, the Northern Lights, the return and passing of comet Kohoutek, and the eruption of Mt. St. Helens.

Had anyone fully understood the Heavens above the Earth, of the Earth and in the waters under the Earth? There were more or less plausible explanations, but Banting was suddenly aware of an uneasy suspicion of mystery in the universe below the surface of what Fellows like him regarded the limits of their concern.

* * *

“From the perspective of psychiatry, what do you make of witches in general, and demonic possession in particular? You knew about the claims of hereditary preference?”

“Banning, surely you are pulling my leg,” said his friend David as they walked down the sidewalk, hands shoved in pockets against the wind. “As physicians, we deal with the living, not imaginings of the afterlife. Turn here: he Church I mentioned is just around the corner…”

The two friends stepped up the stone stairs and pushed through a heavy door into the silence of the chancel.

The Church was empty of worshippers but that was expected even though it was October 16^th.

A guide greeted them from the back of the church.

“No, they don’t remember, much less celebrate the martyrdom of Latimer, Ridley and the following year, Cranmer,” said the Sexton, a caretaker to whom they had been referred when asking after the renovation of colonial Commandment Boards. “1555…they were burned in the street at Oxford…, the ministers, not the boards…”

“Thanks, much for taking time to show us around,” Banning said amiably. “We visit in the capacity as architectural historians and carpenters, not as The Faithful.”

“Not believers?” said the Sexton, arching a suspicious eyebrow. “No matter: we are delighted anyone would take an interest…”

“Colonial New Haven Colony would have followed the dictates of the Queen…” continued the Sexton, unlocking an old door and using his hip to push it open. “Elizabeth…”

“Queen Elizabeth I?” asked Banning, his friend more observing than taking part in the conversation.

“Yes, that’s right. That means the congregation was addressing an edict from several centuries before…even though by 1752 when the first church was built here, there was no love lost between the Royal Family and the independently-minded colonists here.”

“And yet, even today,” the Sexton continued, “…there is an affinity for many of the Anglican traditions of early America…”

* * *

Banning, as he went about his morning routines, considered how the human mind, so often confronted with incompletely observed natural events, might have coped.

There were likewise zoological oddities that might not be understood, such as the passing overhead in a fog, of a flight of migrating geese and for mariners, the eerie echoes of the unearthly songs of the humpback whales between Cape Cod and Bermuda, that must have disturbed the slumbers of nineteenth century mariners sleeping with an ear near the oaken hulls of otherwise silent sailing ships.

In his overworked imagination, Banning added colors and textures of the ghost story that had not yet crystallized in his mind’s eye, aware such a notion might not find an expression this early in his scientific career, but might suddenly arise later in life, like a phantom unborn, and yet still eager to breathe on its own.

However, despite painterly and literary visions, he still lacked a plot, but worse, had no fundamental talent for invention of events that hung together as a story. He simply had no plan of action, despite how clear and crisp the various characters seemed that particular October evening in his poorly lit but sunlight-flooded carriage house in New Haven.

He had to get out more often, a voice in his head whispered.

* * *

After coffee, he thumbed through the stack of library books.

Here, it was Linton’s book that provided an early clue that he might write, that might be abandoned in an attic, only to resurface decades later.

Linton’s summary provided the most common literary elements found in the classic ghost tale or story of witchcraft, for the two were intertwined.

The first element was emergence of demonic possession of a previously normal villager. The finding that the possessed person spoke in an impossible tone of voice or language is also described in classic religious texts and folklore of several cultural traditions. Among the Salem transcripts and in the Bible, is the demon or satanic figure, who will not divulge his proper name, often used to justify the finding of demonic possession. Likewise, age-inappropriate sexual behavior in a young child was thought to indicate the presence of an outside malevolent influence.

The forces of nature, especially those animals known to be dangerous to humans, also are common elements in such folktales going as far back as the serpent of the Book of Genesis and before.

Such biological topics caught Banning’s eye and captured his interest perhaps more than the sociological aspects of ghosts of the dead and demonic possession of the living. It was not surprising to Dr. Peter Banning that evil and malevolent intent might be ascribed to wild animals that were larger and more powerful than humans, and in many cases early in prehistory, were direct competitors with early hominids for resources and shelter.

Literature and religious traditions were rife with supernatural wild beasts, unique for color or size or behavior, that manifested as evil incarnate, intent only on the destruction and annihilation of human life and comfort.

As zoological nemeses, the creatures imputed with evil, were larger, more powerful, more resistant to human intervention and weapons and thereby an unusual challenge to human ingenuity to conquer.

These often embodied the face of demonic evil and conveyed the beastliness of an unusually large and violent predator such as a bear, a large wolf or other canid, a headless bear or a large scaly reptile reminiscent of a dinosaur, an alligator or komodo dragon as the physical manifestation of a demon who is otherwise of recognizably human in anatomical form.

The discomfort with which every human culture in history had regarded individual mortality, had also been played upon by writers with insight into what the human psyche finds both most appealing as well as absolutely most terrifying. Always, there had been the uncertainty of death, the horror of accidental live burials, or the return to vital animation of partially decomposing corpses as zombies.

There was terror in the posthumous return of a loved one, or a domestic family pet with whom there had been great trust and love, in a malevolent, murderous and revolting physical form.

* * *

Banning’s reading at an early age had worried his mother. She had gone so far as to ask her pediatrician whether boy his age normally spent so much time reading.

And yet Banning’s curiosity was not limited to natural science.

English Victorian writer Oscar Wilde had always been high among Banning’s list of great stylists of fiction. The two Wilde literary pieces that Banning would return to, as he considered the invention and writing of his own ghost story, included The Picture of Dorian Grey and the short work in which an American family buys an English manor in which the baronial owner has been murdered, but haunts his old estate.

In these finalized literary works, and the clues offered in religious tradition and historical testimony and adjudication of alleged witchcraft, Banning might find an antecedent, even if many years passed between that particular Thursday night in on maple Street in New Haven, and the actual writing of such fantasies.

He fully realized that among lay people, as a scientist, he would bear the taint of sorcerer and conjurer, even as medical and biological science, as it developed, would engender lingering images and impressions that were the fertile output of talented, but perhaps deluded, authors.

Among the first feminist authors who came to significant attention by crafting a horrifying tale based on Greek and Roman myths and that human aversion to intervention in the process of creating new human life and life forms, was youthful Mary Wolstencroft Shelly and her immortal work Frankenstein. It posited the immoral success of a doctor in a castle who found the secret to resurrecting the dead by means of electric impulse administered to a makeshift and fabricated corpse. The result was a much maligned and traditionally misunderstood beast who, in retrospect, is one of the most sympatric creatures in all of English literature, but whose impact is still remembered in the modern age of biotechnology and the debate over abortion and the nature, timing and identity of human life.

Banting had often thought a modern, anti-Shellian tale, perhaps Frankenstein Revisited, might result in greater public tolerance for genetic engineering in the human species.

Yes, Banting had before him, all these considerations, possibilities and opportunities spread before him on the tiny, inexpensive drop leaf side table used as the desk he had purchased from a company named Unfinished Furniture.

Had he been less preoccupied with human gene mapping, there might have been a better chance that such ideas might have led somewhere productive, but all these notions passed in a flurry of distractions that particular night a week or two before Halloween that year, never to return as a dream, an ambition or a concern.

Banning might have played the part, and tried to take advantage, agnostic that he was in the weeks he was not an outright but passive atheist, of the surrounding idiosyncrasies of established American Protestantism he still saw around him, in their time-honored and cynical attempt to play on and exploit human gullibility. The human spirit, uncertain about itself and its infallible gravitation toward superstition when it did not comprehend something or when it refused the logical and correct explanation that required education to adopt as reality.

The more he pondered the ghost tale as a paradigm of expository writing, the more perennial and seasonal favorite occurred to him. For example, Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, as another source of ghost lore to supplement the themes of classic Shakespearean theater in the feast scene in which the ghost of Banquo reappears to Macbeth.

The ghost tale was traditionally a cultural vehicle for demonstrating a moral principle, much like a Grimm Brothers fairy tale. In addition, such tales might also illustrate the principle of just retribution to an evil doer, in a society where the evil often triumph more often than the just. There was a socially acceptable characteristic, satisfied lust, to great violence done to an evil character, or one who is portrayed an evil, a human pattern often employed to great, if unjustified, effect, in modern politics.

Before closing his weary eyes that night and pulling up the covers, Dr. Peter Banning laid such things to rest by writing the better ideas out in skeletal outline for some later day when more time and mind were available.

There would be time when his own imagination, freed from prior work, would lead the way, but that stage would be some time ahead.

* * *

“Look David, thanks for meeting me,” Banning said over a cup of coffee weeks later.

“No problem, and thanks for going to that Church with me. Otherwise, it might have been a little..er…”

“Uncomfortable?” suggested Banning. “You didn’t know at one time I was Episcopal, did you?”

“So: I’m a Jew, but not really…” David replied. “Glad to have someone interested in old architectural details along…”

“What I had hoped to ask…”

“Yes?”

“How is Uta?”

“Oh: Uta. She’s nice, why?”

Banning wasn’t expecting a straight answer about a powerful faculty member who might hold the key to David’s future when he completed his Fellowship. He knew she wasn’t happy he jumped ship to transfer across campus, ostensibly as a result of his assault.

“Can you keep a secret?” Banning leaned forward, catching the curiosity rising in David’s tortoise shell frames. At a glance, he might have looked like a comic Groucho, Jewish nose with the moustache, but having a beard made it less noticeable.

“Sure.”

“When I first arrived in New Haven, I didn’t know she had separated from Bertold…”

“Her husband?”

“Yes: she didn’t tell me the truth of her situation until I arrived at her door, her isolated farmhouse in Guilford, with no other place to stay…”

“Yes: nice spot. Has her own pond…no neighbors…So?”

“She seemed eager to have me join her in the sauna she had built in the cellar…just the two of us.”

David’s mouth seemed as amused as it was discreet. He seemed to be waiting for more. He finally spoke after staring at Banning a moment.

“So, the two of you…”

“Yes.”

A few minutes later, as they finished the dregs of coffee, Banning broke the silence.

“Do you think she practices witchcraft?” was what was on Banning’s mind…

***