Fall is a season that causes some people regret. They turn a sad eye to the waning sky and say good-bye to warm days and suntans. I, on the other hand, couldn't be more pleased. To sunburns and long days I say, "Good riddance." As the days grow colder, my anticipation increases. For what? Death, of course, when leaves wither and spiders come in to escape from the cold. When all things cold and dark and hidden emerge from underground.
As a child, I prayed for rain. It wasn't my choice to live in the blasting furnace of the Sonoran desert. The natives of my hometown were as oppressive and unfriendly as the heat, and my adoption made me an outsider. So, until I could run off to London and marry a hollow-cheeked cellist, calling clouds would have to do. Every time I called them, it rained. In a child's mind, oppressed by bewildering loneliness and the pain of not fitting in, rain was a joyful event. The cool waters temporarily diminished the heat. In the deeper recesses of my memory, rain also led to floods and inundation, and back to my real mother, whoever she was.
Later on, the idea of steamship romance led to dreams of shipwrecks and icebergs. My lover and I would of course drown together, only to be reborn in the silvery tendrils of the giant arctic jellyfish called Cyanea, the angel who greeted the dead from the S.S. Titanic and so many other ill-fated offerings taken by the sea.
When I analyze how I discovered the way of witches, I begin with the rain, and end with the Galloways, my "real" family. They didn't sign papers, but adopted me all the same. My adoptive mother wanted a Shirley Temple, but the Galloways accepted me for what I was, a misfit like them. The only things they had to defend themselves with were money and social power; the only thing I had was them and their bad reputation.
Every day after school, the Galloways welcomed me into their weird home: a grand corner house with a pet buzzard in the yard, a bunny-rabbit cemetery and a laboratory hidden in the garage. Stepping into their house was like entering a portal to another world. Behind you was the desert. Once you crossed the kitchen, another time and place challenged your sensibilities, offering peace and true escape from the stifling banality that waited outside.
The youngest Galloway, Christine, had few friends. Her mother suspected most of the neighbor children of mental weakness, but when I approached a marble figure of a Chinese emperor in the parlor and said "Look, it's Sigmund Freud!" I was allowed to stay. Away from the glare of the sun and the taunts of conformist-bullies, there were French doors and dark rooms, skulls from New Guinea, insects pinned on paper and piles of magazines by a comfortable chair not covered in vinyl.
Christine's middle name was Alice; it was her soul name, in fact. Her older sister Carol often compared her to the heroine from Wonderland. Every member of the family possessed a Victorian kind of eccentric beauty. When Carol combed Christine's thick mane of storybook hair, she said she was "carding her wool." Carol possessed a calm, sweet voice, the diametric opposite of my parents' Brooklynese. Her lilt was perfect for calling the fey, and call them she did.
Carol entertained us constantly with fairy stories. The best ones were of her own creation, ornate biographies of the little ones who had invaded her home. They were called as unofficial playmates for Christine and stayed for the music lessons. Some were merely mischievous, like the little lady dressed in French finery from Versailles. Christine opened sleepy eyes one morning to discover a four-inch-high thief trying to steal her gold clock. Others, most likely called by Mead, were more threatening. Christine's room was the battleground for their machinations, from pinching to late-night teddy-bear mutilations. Gradually, we were conditioned to the changed climate of the house. Life among mortals was secondary to the terrors and delights brought by the fey. (Our other friends couldn't make time stop, or levitate metronomes above a piano.)
Snakes often stood guard to preserve the sanctity of the Galloway home, and after-school trips to the Galloways often meant hazarding an obstacle course of pots and pans left on the floor. One day, when Mrs. Galloway muttered "Mead's damn snakes got out again," I understood why heavy aluminum was on the carpet. She would angrily hit the pots with her vacuum cleaner, causing their contents to rattle back. Unfazed, Christine would usher me into our reading room, where we tore through piles of New Yorkers, devouring Addams Family cartoons. To compare them to the Galloways was a supreme compliment to both.
Helen, Mrs. Galloway, looked like Vanessa Redgrave. She was full of contradictions, a Christian Scientist who smoked and kept an occasional beer in the fridge. Unlike Morticia, Mrs. Galloway didn't while away her days clipping rosebuds off their thorny stems. She verbally beheaded all who displeased her, meaning the majority of our town, those who weren't intelligent enough. Sitting at her kitchen table, I basked in her righteous indignation. It felt like she was getting even for both of us.
She almost destroyed her marriage by following her conscience and joining the WAC during World War II, leaving her husband to fight jungle rot in the Pacific while she recruited women from rural Indian reservations in Wyoming and Colorado. Mr. Galloway was everything that Helen wasn't, a lapsed Mormon whose political beliefs were the direct opposite of her own. They agreed on nothing, including the care of their two eldest children, whose health crises would eventually tear the family asunder.
Mead excelled in spreading confusion, causing us to question not only our existence, but our right to breath the same air. Christine was frequently reminded that she was using up all the oxygen in the room; there were saints in Bavaria who lived on nothing but air. She needed to breath more slowly.
My weakness for Mead was my parentage. Did I know why they gave me away? Were they coming back? I should be careful walking home. Mead enjoyed scaring the hell out of us. Through words and intonation alone, he seduced me time and again into ecstatic states where fear meant pleasure. This was his special talent, and I have yet to find his equal.
His bedroom was jungle green, lined with books, chemistry glass and a human skull whose teeth chattered when the evaporative cooler was in operation. Christine and I would race down the hall, competing for the honor of being the first to touch the skull. Running back before Mead discovered the intrusion was harder. I could never decide what was more pleasurable, touching the remains of a headhunter or hearing Mead's calm threat to take me into the desert and never bring me back.
The desert was his source of solitude and witnessed more of his crimes than his fellow men. On good days, he would take us deep into the mountains outside of town, where we would explore old burial grounds. He would encourage us to hunt for geodes, only to terrify us with the announcement that they were the refuse of demon-hatchlings. "You're standing near their nest. Don't you know what the mother will do when she sees you stealing her eggs?" Did we want to go home yet? We were too afraid to disagree with him, and too afraid to move.
Our geological outings included gravity-defying rides without a safety net. A true adventurer, no incline prevented Mead from four-wheeling up steep hills and down into narrow ravines. When he asked us how high we wanted to go, we dared not cross his enthusiasm. With the Jeep's tailgate gone, it was necessary to call upon all of our powers of concentration to keep from slipping out and falling down the hill. We clung to the Jeep with white fingernails as he shifted into higher gear. I wanted the ride to never end.
The desert provided Mead with all manner of wildlife to rescue and catalog. He bred exotic beetles that were used for a summer-evening sport the family found more fun than croquet. As storm-clouds gathered with the promise of a flash flood at twilight, we would gather to wager over how many beetles Mead could drive from their holes with a garden hose.
The human-sized deep-freeze on the front porch, even more than sinister brother Mead, acted as a ward, keeping prying neighbors at bay. (The "bloody" contents of both lab and freezer would be a neighborhood scandal for years to come.) Murgatroyd was the only caged buzzard on our block, or any block, for that matter. Mead found him lame on a highway and nursed him back to health. He lived for a year after capture, and his feeding time was a source of much controversy. His dinner consisted of frozen meat taken straight from the porch freezer. Rumor spread that he was fed with the flesh of local cats. Christine would never confirm whether or not this libel was true. However, there was the day Mrs. Taylor banged on the Galloway door, sobbing that Mead had killed her cat.
Summer meant trips to the Galloway cabin. Carol supervised the annual raspberry harvest. Christine would sometimes be suspended by her ankles, facilitating the picking of the most difficult to reach fruit. The "bitter critters" were promptly frozen and stored for off-season enjoyment. That these pints of berries resembled flesh of another sort did not escape us, and one day, we proudly announced to our friends the Smith twins that these were packets of the alleged bird food. One lie simply reinforced the horror of the awful truth: Mead's dissecting room in the backyard garage was uncovered. After that, they spread the word that we were dealers in feline flesh.
When the fey weren't called with flowers and chants, they drifted in on music. All of Helen's children were accomplished musicians, and I was encouraged to learn as many instruments as I could master. Beethoven, Bach and the rare Chopin were the order of the day. The Galloway piano couldn't hold a pitch but had a quavering voice that echoed throughout the house. During one especially cold winter, it also lost three octaves, on account of the hibernating King snake nestled inside. The decision was made to leave her be, and a moratorium was called on Beethoven's deeper works until she woke up.
When we weren't reading about Wednesday Addams' guillotine, we lived for the Saturday matinee. Christopher Lee's Dracula was the object of our young desires. The price was steep for an erotic afternoon: going home by myself down a dark alley. Carol and Christine were not the least bit sympathetic. They endured the darkness; so could I. My fear of the dark ended the year I began to bleed. Menstruation had made me bold. No longer would shadows keep me in my place.
Carol and Mead were schooled early in how to defy death. Both juvenile diabetics, they learned to inject insulin. Their sickness was treated, although Helen still relied on the services of Christian Science healers for other matters. The error of their illness kept Christine ignorant of the precariousness of their health. She never understood why her parents seethed at one another, fighting over who was to blame for their children's afflictions. When Mead grew ill, Mr. Galloway decided that no diabetic could be his son. His beloved heir was rejected. When Carol was next to fall ill, this theory was dashed, so he blamed Helen instead. Both siblings would die at age 30 of insulin-induced comas.
The cruelty of their illness remained hidden from Christine and me. She never understood the hospital trips, and the occasional bad moods of her brother and sister. What she did understand was that it was wrong to take ill. Like many children of Scientists, she hid sickness, silently suffering from ear infections that almost stole her hearing. When I was sick on the day of her eighth birthday, I was told to recover and attend. I remember arriving late. In a rare moment, I was the center of attention. Heavily praised for chasing the flu from my body, I was led into a room draped in red velvet. Lamps glowed on the walls, illuminating a blue sponge cake. Roasted doves were served with tea, making this the most profane party a child ever had.
As we grew older, Mead was less involved in our lives. He dated the most beautiful and desirable girls in high school. My brother, a dead ringer for Harrison Ford, expressed constant frustration at how a "geek" got the best girls. Apparently, Mead knew the power of fear and transcendence. My own adolescent fantasies of desire were tainted by "Mead the Seductive." I dreamed of my one true love, who would be a scientist who could alter time and space. He would set off a fire in my head, and without touching me, I would feel his kiss on my cheek. We would marry in a San Francisco funeral parlor, and honeymoon in Death Valley.
Mead and Carol faced death every day they fed their bodies insulin. I envied their power, until one summer when I discovered that in some parts of the world, I was already dead. Christine came racing to my cloud-window one hot afternoon, ready to burst with the scandal absorbed from sneaking snippets of our mothers' conversation: "Her real parents never asked to see her at the hospital." "Didn't you worry that they would change their minds and take her back?" "The social worker assured me that her parents told everyone she was dead." Truly, I had become invincible.
As a teenager, I found other friends to travel in the desert with, but they failed to frighten me. Getting high was all that mattered to them; they laughed at the idea of gargoyle's eggs. Retiring from my brief popularity with stoners, I returned to the Galloway fold after my freshman year in high school.
In the cemetery after school, Christine would paint her psychedelic bicycle while I read aloud about the tragic lives of Aleister Crowley and Charles Manson.. We would sit on our favorite monument and eat cheesecake, convinced that we could consume the mistakes of the recently departed, just like the Welsh sin-eaters. Sometimes our friend Eunice was to join us, relating tales of the White Lady of Mexico, who wandered dry riverbeds at dusk, searching for her lost children.
The cemetery sparked the kind of romantic fantasy that Mead had engendered so long ago and inspired a feeling of peace bordering on titillation. Like Percy Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft, I longed to find a lover and perform my own death-defying acts on a freshly covered grave.
Today, only one Galloway remains. Christine cards her own wool now, and still believes in the fey. She carries on Carol's wisdom of flowers and herbs and has preserved Mead's keen intellect and cynicism. We still laugh at the thought of how much "Uncle Aleister" resembled her father.
After years of missing Carol and Mead, I came to realize that if you love someone, they never really leave you. Like all living things, they may depart for awhile, but like the fey, if you remember them, they will always come back.
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