In many respects what she said was difficult to accept. But certainly it was true that I had felt that I did not understand the real purpose of my life. And certainly I had been brought to Drake’s Landing not of my own free will. –
“Our group has made several scientifically-authenticated sightings,” Mrs. Hambro continued. “We’ve established contact with these evolved superior beings who are in control of the universe and who are directing the cosmic radiation here in an effort to save us from our own anti-christ. I saw the anti-christ last night. They’s why I’m here. I knew then that I had to contact you and get you into our group. We’ve had eleven or twelve people contact us in the last week or so, due to various articles printed in newspapers, some of them facetious in tone.” From this manila envelope she got a newspaper clipping and passed it to me.
The clipping read:
LOCAL SAUCER GROUP SAYS SUPERIOR BEINGS CONTROLLING MAN, LEADING US TO WORLD WAR III
Inverness Park. World War Three will begin before the end of May, and not to destroy man but to save him, according to Mrs. Edward Hambro of Inverness Park, Marin County. The flying saucer group of which she is the spokesman declares that several psychic contacts have been made with the “superior beings who are in control of our lives,” and who “are leading us to material destruction for the purpose of spiritual salvation,” Mrs. Hambro’s words. The group meets once a week to report sightings of UFOs, unidentified flying objects. There are twelve members of the group, from Inverness Park and surrounding towns of north west Marin County. They meet in Mrs. Hambro’s home. “Scientists know that the world is about to explode,” Mrs. Hambro declared. “Either from a build-up of internal pressures, or from man-made atomic radiation. In any case, man must prepare for the end of the world.”
I handed the clipping back to Mrs. Hambro and she returned it to her envelope. “That was in the San Rafael Journal,” she said. “It also appeared in Petaluma newspapers and Sacramento newspapers. They didn’t give a fair impression of what I said.”
“I see,” I said, feeling odd and weak. The strength of her gaze made my head hum. I have never met another person to this day who affected me as much as Claudia Hambro. The sunlight, when it reached her eyes, didn’t reflect in the usual way but was broken up into splinters. That fascinated me. Sitting across from her, not very far from her, I saw a portion of the room reflected in her eyes, and it was not the same; it became bits instead of a single plane of reality. As she talked I kept watching that fragmented light. And never once, in all the time that she talked, did she blink.
“Have you had queer sensations recently, like silk being drawn across your stomach?” she asked me. “Or heard loud whistles, on people talking? I hear them saying, ‘Don’t wake Claudia. It’s not time for her to awake.’
“I have had some sensations,” I said. For the past month I had had a terrible tight feeling around my head, as if my forehead were about to burst. And my nose had been so constricted that I had been almost unable to breathe. Fay had said it was the usual sinus inflammation that people felt so near the ocean, with the strong winds, plus the pollen from all the flowers and trees, but I had never been convinced.
“Are they getting stronger?” Mrs. Hambro asked.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will you be over Friday afternoon?” she said. “To the group? When it meets?”
I nodded.
At that, she arose and put our her cigarette. “If Fay wants to come,” she said, “she’s welcome. Tell her she’s always welcome.” Without another word she left.
Completely overwhelmed, I remained seated where I was.
That evening, when Fay found out that Claudia Hambro had come by, she had a terrible fit.
“That woman’s a nut!” she cried. She was in the bathroom washing her hair at the bowl; I was holding the spray for her and she was rubbing the shampoo out. The girls had gone to their rooms to watch tv. “She’s really out of her mind. My god, she had shock treatment a couple of years ago and she tried to kill herself once. She believes Martians are in touch with us — she has that nutty group that meets over in Inverness Park — they hypnotize people. Her father’s one of the most arch-reactionaries in Marin County, one of the big dairy ranchers out on the Point that’s responsible for our having the worst high school in the fourteen western states.”
I said, “She asked me to come over on Friday and take pant in a meeting of their group.”
“Of course she did,” Fay said. “She tracks down everybody who moves up here. I’ll bet she told you it was ‘destiny that brought you up here.’ Right?”
I nodded.
“They think they’re pawns in the hands of superior beings,” she said, “When actually they’re pawns in the hands of their own subconsciouses, which have run amock. She ought to be in an institution.” Grabbing a towel she pushed rudely past me, and out of the bathroom, down the hall to the living room. Following after her I found her kneeling down in front of the fireplace, drying her hair. “I suppose they’re harmless,” she said. “Maybe it’s better for their systemized schizophrenia to take the form of delusions about superior beings than to go into overt paranoia of a persecution type and imagine people are trying to kill them.”
Hearing Fay say all this, I had to admit that there was a good deal of truth in it. A lot of what Mrs. Hambro had said hadn’t rung right to me; it did have the sound of mental derangement.
But on the other hand, every prophet and saint has been called “insane” by his times. Naturally a prophet would appear insane, because he would hear and see and understand things that no one else could. They would be stoned and derided during their lifetimes, exactly as Christ had been. I could see what Fay meant, but also I could see not a little logic in what Claudia Hambro said.
“Are you going?” Fay said.
“Maybe so,” I said, feeling embarrassed to admit it.
“I knew this would happen,” was all she would say. For the nest of the evening she refused to say another word to me; in fact it wasn’t until the next morning, when she wanted me to go down to the Mayfair and shop for her, that she said anything to me.
“Her whole family’s that way,” Fay said. At the closet she was putting on her suede leather jacket. “Her sister, her father, her aunt — it’s in their blood. Listen, insanity is an infection. Look how it’s infected this whole area, all around Tomales Bay, here. A whole group of people being influenced by that nut. When I first met her three years ago I thought, My god, what an attractive woman. She really is beautiful. She looks like some jungle princess on something. But she impressed me as cold. She has no emotions. She has no capacity to feel normal human emotions. Here she’s got six kids and yet she hates kids; she has no love for them or for Ed. And she’s always pregnant. She’s nuts. It’s the two-year-old mind that controls the world.”
I said nothing.
“She looks like some successful Marin County upper middle class suburban housewife that gives barbecue parties,” Fay said. “And instead she’s a grade A nut.”
Opening the front door she started out.
“I’m going down to San Francisco,” she said. “And visit Charley. You be sure and be here when the girls get home. You know how scared they are to get home and find nobody here.”
“Right,” I said. Since their father’s heart attack, both children had had a lot of anxiety during the night, bad dreams for instance, and spells of unmanageability. And Elsie had begun to wet her bed again. Both girls now asked for a bottle each night before going to bed. That probably had a good deal to do with the bed-wetting.
I knew that in actuality she was not going down to San Francisco to see Charley but was going to meet Nat Anteil, probably somewhere between Point Reyes and Mill Valley, possibly in Fairfax, and have lunch with him. They had been having trouble meeting each other, since his wife Gwen had become suspicious of the time they spent together and had insisted on accompanying him over in the evenings. Since his wife no longer permitted him to visit Fay by himself, he and Fay were up against it.
And in a small town where everybody knows everybody, it is very hard, if not impossible, to have a secret relationship. If you go into a bar with somebody else’s wife, you are recognized by everyone who is there, and the next day it’s written up in the Baywood Press. If you stop to buy gas, Earl Frankis, who owns the Standard Station, recognizes your car and you. If you go into the post office, you are recognized because the post master knows everyone in the area; it’s his job. The barber notices you as you walk by his window. The man in the feed store sits at his desk watching the street all day long. All the clerks at the Mayfair Market know everyone, since everyone charges there. So Fay and Nat had to meet outside the area if they were going to meet at all. And if their relationship became a matter of public knowledge, it was not my fault.