The Secrets on Chicory Lane: A Novel(40)
During the late eighties, I finally saw a psychologist to work out some of the issues I still had with my mother. I felt very guilty about a lot of things, not least with leaving the front door unlocked some twenty years earlier. The way I treated my mother those last years of her life was despicable. Despite the glorious success I was having as an author, my conscience was hammering at me. I had to do something about it, so I chose to pour my heart out to a shrink. The woman I saw tried hard to work with me, but I have to admit her failure was my fault—I just wasn’t very receptive. After a couple of years of therapy, I stopped. Since then, I’ve mostly come to terms, more or less, with my guilt, but there are times when the self-reproach comes crashing back. I live with it and concentrate on my work.
As with most things, a trend is eventually replaced with new ones, and that’s what started happening in 1993 to 1994. For one thing, I wasn’t in the public eye as much. The TV appearances slowed down, and there were fewer requests for interviews, though luckily book sales remained steady. Thus, as I approached my forties, I regained most of my privacy. I could walk the streets, eat in restaurants, and ride the train without being recognized. The few times it happened were never unpleasant.
Again—I was blessed. By whom, I didn’t know, because by that time I wasn’t as religious as I’d been as a girl. Somewhere along the way—probably during my tumultuous marriage—I lost the faith. It wasn’t that I stopped believing in God, it’s just that I ceased paying attention to Him. I don’t believe Eddie had any influence on me in that regard. He had always been an atheist, even as a little boy. He hated it when his parents made him go to church with them, and in reality they didn’t attend often, only visiting on the big holidays like Christmas and Easter. On the other hand, I had to go every Sunday. Between the day I was born and the summer I left Limite for college, I spent nearly every Sunday morning of my life at church. By the time I moved to Austin, I’d had enough of it.
My spirituality underwent a restructuring. I believe I’m a good person, and I try to live by the tenets I learned from Christianity. I just don’t bother much with the organized part of it. I respect people who do, as long as it’s not waved in my face. Like several other authors in our country, I was once attacked by a fanatical religious group about the sex and promiscuity in my books. Oh, please. It’s just entertainment. Sure, sex sells. Sex written for women by a woman is also perfectly healthy.
The problem, I’ve come to realize, is that today I still do not understand the presence of Evil, capital “E” again. It lived on our block in the form of Mr. Alpine. It resided across the street in Charles Newcott. That’s a lot of Evil for one neighborhood. My family—and especially my mother—was in turn corrupted by the Evil inside Mr. Alpine. Poor Eddie—the boy across the street—was damaged by the one inside his dad. Where did that Evil come from? If there really is a God, does that mean there really is a Satan? Eddie tried to convince me when I was twelve that there was no God, only the devil.
But enough of the philosophizing. Back to the year 1994, the period when my career was settling down to a comfortable routine without too much media attention.
That’s when I crossed paths with Eddie again.
17
News of Eddie was elusive during those years between 1977, the last time I saw him, and 1994. My father filled me in on some of the well-known bits, such as Eddie going to prison for twenty months. In 1984, Eddie got into another fight at some bar outside of Limite and nearly killed a guy. For that incident, charges were pressed.
Around the time I got divorced and published my first novel, Dad moved out of the house on Chicory Lane. Since I rarely came home, he didn’t think there was any reason to stay. Why should one person have all that space when a nice family might want it? He bought an apartment in a newer part of the city but still not far from the bank. I didn’t blame him. It was a tainted house.
For that matter, so was Eddie’s. Was it a coincidence that the two houses, directly across the street from each other, contained broken families? Two different tragedies, united in pain. But Eddie continued to stay on Chicory Lane. He belonged in an artistic community in a bigger city, but he didn’t budge. What became abundantly clear was that Eddie was a small-town boy at heart, and he had a very strong emotional tie to Limite and the Newcott home. The bomb shelter, his man cave, was precious to him. He must have thought he would be happy there for the rest of his life.
But as it turned out, he wasn’t happy at all. Instead, Eddie went over to the dark side. That’s the only way I can describe it. The darker qualities he had been displaying toward the end of our relationship manifested themselves into something more sinister.
This is what I learned, or ultimately found out. Devil Man became a minor hit in the underground comics scene, so Eddie continued to work on his art. He probably wasn’t making a lot of money from it, so I suppose he simply lived off his mother’s social security and his father’s insurance. A grown man living with his mom. You’d think that would be enough to tell you that Eddie lacked certain social skills, but the truth is far worse.
He developed a mental illness, and he became a Satanist.
Mind you, I’m no psychiatrist, but I’m not sure those two things were exclusive. Perhaps they were. I don’t mean to say that anyone who worships Satan is mentally ill—of course not. And not all souls who suffer from mental illness become Satanists. But from what I knew about Eddie’s life, and from what I heard and discovered about his behavior during this period, I do believe the two traits were linked. I found out about the Satanism fairly quickly because it was obvious. The mental illness—well, that took a while to figure out.