The Odditorium: Stories

By Melissa Pritchard

“A writer at the height of her powers.” ―Oprah.com

In each of these eight lyrical and baroque tales, Melissa Pritchard transports readers into spine-tingling milieus that range from the astounding realm of Robert LeRoy Ripley’s “odditoriums” to the courtyard where Edgar Allan Poe once played as a child. Whether she is setting the famed figures of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, including Annie Oakley and Sitting Bull, against the real, genocidal history of the American West, or contrasting the luxurious hotel where British writer Somerset Maugham stayed with the modern-day brothels of India, her stories illuminate the many ways history and architecture exert powerful forces upon human consciousness.

Melissa Pritchard is the author of the novel Palmerino, the short story collection The Odditorium, and the essay collection A Solemn Pleasure: To Imagine, Witness, and Write, among other books. Emeritus Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Arizona State University, she now lives in Columbus, Georgia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
• Release date: Jan 10, 2012
• ISBN: 9781934137475

Melissa Pritchard

MELISSA PRITCHARD is the author of twelve books, including a biography and collection of essays. Her first short story collection, Spirit Seizures, won the 1988 Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction, the Carl Sandburg Award, the James Phelan Award from the San Francisco Foundation and was named a New York Times Editor’s Choice and Notable Book of the Year. A five time winner of Pushcart and O. Henry Prizes and consistently cited in Best American Short Stories, Melissa has published fiction and non-fiction in such literary journals, anthologies, textbooks, magazines as The Paris Review, Ploughshares, A Public Space, Conjunctions, Agni, Ecotone, The Gettysburg Review, O, The Oprah Magazine, The Nation, the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune. A recent Marguerite and Lamar Smith Fellow at the Carson McCullers Center for Writers and Musicians in Columbus, Georgia, Melissa’s newest novel is Tempest: The Extraordinary Life of Fanny Kemble (2021). www.melissapritchard.com.

Book preview

PELAGIA, HOLY FOOL

. . . we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men.We are fools, for Christ’s sake.

—I Corinthians 4:9–10

Part the First: Spin, Beat, Spin

Listen, wicked children! When une jeune slut-fille dirties her own halo, simple folk cast stones, and it takes the baroque and obstinate solemnity of God to bring them to their knees before a creature of such dire humility. Pelagia, born during the pre-revolutionary era of Tsar Alexander I, was a scoundrel-saint, a staretz who flipped a convent full of pent-up, quarrelsome women on its head and put up with having her vile, unwashed feet kissed by a failing empire of wonder-struck pilgrims.

In 1809, little Pelagia Ivanovna Surin Serebrenikova slipped like a worm from her mother’s fleshy cabbage-cunt in the village of Arzamas, two hundred and fifty miles miles east of Moscow, that medieval Byzantine city abandoned by Peter the Great in favor of a new capital built atop drained swamps and islands by the sea, an imperial opulence of palaces known poetically as the Palmyra of the North, and more prosaically, as Saint Petersburg.

Better looking than average, with strong teeth and an exceptional mind, the child Pelagia Ivanovna Surin Serebrenikova fell ill one day and lay senseless as a stone upon her pallet of straw. Upon arising, little Pela was quite gone, and in her place stood a lazy good-for-nothing who planted herself in the back of the family vegetable garden, twirling this way and that, hoisting her skirts shamelessly high above her head. Disgrace! wept the mother, seeing her child’s fine looks and future fortune squandered by this abdication of wits. No longer the apple of her mother’s eye, but an Idiota! Saloi! Yurodivye! Go ahead, she wailed, beat the girl, hammer at her with fists or switches, pelt her with stewed turnips, fire away at her with macerated apples. She will only whirl on, a brainless top, dervish sport for her six slovenly stepbrothers and drunken stepfather.

Pelagia spun upward into a blond giantess, bewitching all of Arzamas with her vertiginous beauty. Suitors lined up like cannon, like muskrats, like grave-borne communicants. Sick to death of her nitwit daughter, Pela’s mother spun her toward the very first muskrat, an Arzamasian upstart with buck teeth and a russet rind of bristly mustache, eager to take Pelagia into his own hands. Sergei Vasileivich was a peculiar fellow, slightly consumptive, a military reject who puttered away, constructing miniature earthen fortresses patrolled by motionless battalions of toy soldiers made of wax. Disciplinary lapses in this tiny army were severely punished.

Sergei once conducted a mock-interrogatory trial in which a field rat was found guilty of gnawing off the wax head of one of his finest officers; the rodent was summarily hanged to the tune of Sergei’s improvisatory drumroll and made-up tune, Alas, there thou hangest. . . . !

On his wedding day, wearing a handmade linen shirt and too-tight red military-style breeches, with his pointy snout and garland of gourd blossoms on his carroty, disheveled hair, Sergei failed to notice how his bride, towering over him, kept surreptitiously watering the cloth posies on her dress with weak spoonfuls of horehound tea. Gripped by lust, monstrously priapic, Sergei didn’t care a fig for Pelagia’s watering antics and trundled his bride away in a collapsing wooden cart, steering the reins of a borrowed nag with one hand and grabbing handfuls of tea-wetted flesh with the other, as was his right under God.

Part the Second: Dead Children, Holy Indicators, A Pillow of Iron Shackles

Clap hands over ears, little devils! From this disastrous union Pelagia bore two sons in quick succession, each of whom perished. Rumors flew through Arzamas that she had first squeezed and smothered the infants between her gargantuan breasts, then flung them, salted and boiled, no better than suckling runts, into Sergei’s favorite pork and parsnip porridge.

One winter’s morning, Sergei’s mother came to fetch the unhappy couple and take them to Father Seraphim of Sarov, a man of saintly reputation. As the unlucky Sergei Vasileivich and his mother waited in the monastery’s bare, freezing anteroom, Seraphim (reputed model for Father Zosima in Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov) closeted the giantess in his cell where they prayed together for long, suspect hours before he came out and commanded Sergei to leave this child of God alone. She was divine real estate. She was His.

Absolved, Pelagia spun ever faster about Arzamas, half-naked, in woolen rags, begging and giving alms away by day, praying and weeping in the Napolny churchyard by night. Sergei, God’s cuck-hold, took matters into his own hands and delivered his knucklehead wife to a monastery in Kiev for an exorcism. Returning home two days after his wife due to a pesky bout of gonorrhea, he discovered Pelagia had given away all of his belongings, right down to his scarlet wedding breeches, miniature fortifications, toy soldiers, and his favorite pewter spoon. Chanting I am unafraid of you, I am unafraid of you, Sergei seized his wife by two fingers and carried her out of doors where he chained her by a rusted length of iron shackle to the side of his sacked and worthless house. There thou hangest, he sang, just as he had with the doomed rat, and improvised a military drum roll. But Pelagia escaped three times—unaware she would one day use that same length of iron chain for her anchorite’s pillow.

Now everyone in Arzamas began to take a turn at beating sense into Pelagia, even the mayor and the police constable, for it was believed she housed demons, and if these infernal imps could be driven out with stones, sticks, whips, stewed turnips, and rotting melons, Pelagia might yet be an exemplary wife, might yet cook, clean, and scissor out her legs for Sergei at night after all the other chores were done. But beatings proved useless, and what was worse, the mayor had a dream that set the entire village on edge, a dream warning of divine retribution upon anyone who laid a finger on Pelagia. Meanwhile, Sergei happened upon a village girl with a face and limbs far plainer than Pelagia’s but who could walk in a perfectly straight line from here to there.

Sergei spun Pela back to her mother. Damaged goods, he muttered. She was a freak and ruining his life, and he had the chance to marry a plain, stupid girl who would ask no questions and bear him children out of her sturdy, obedient cabbage. The stepfather and six brothers warily resumed their beatings, while the stepsister plotted murder, convincing an acquaintance to take aim, yet when the fellow missed his target, he turned the gun upon himself, for what had he done but try to put a bullet in a living saint? The curse of Pelagia lay like a pall over the entire village. No one outside the family dared harm her for fear of having his own skin flayed. Her mother hauled her off one last time to Seraphim of Sarov, who repeated himself. Pelagia must not be harmed, she was God’s Fool, Seraphim’s Seraphima, and would one day help many climb the ladder to heaven. Half-dead with disappointment, the mother prayed violently for a miracle. Relief arrived in the form of three abbesses passing through Arzamas, who agreed to take the girl back with them to Diveyevo, a forest community in the province of Nizhegorod, founded by Seraphim. The mother leapt at this chance to be rid of her whirligig of a daughter, and at last Seraphim’s prophecy that Matrushka , or Mother, as he had taken to calling Pelagia, would one day help many, began to take shape.

Part the Third: Dung, Cockroaches, Frogs

Turn a blind eye while looking both ways. Cross over now, petits enfants! Pelagia was rejected by Diveyevo’s nuns, scourged and beaten as she twirled about, breaking windows with stones and generally acting completely out of her head. Abbess Xenia assigned her a companion who beat her with a stouter stick than anyone, yet unlike ordinary people, Pelagia rejoiced in her chastisements, for the Holy Fool’s fate is to turn the universe upside down, dodge moral lassitude, and rise above the Great Human Myopic. A Fool-for-God liberates herself through humiliation, climbs heavenward up a steep, lonely incline of lunacy.

All at once, Sister Folly stopped twirling and settled into a routine. Squatting in the courtyard of the convent, Pelagia chipped a trough in the dirt, a mock catacomb, using a spoon stolen from the refectory. Filling the niche with manure, she sat down in shit, spooning dung into her gorgeous bosom. When her first companion died, she was given another, Anna Gerasimovna, with whom Pelagia would live out the next forty-seven years in a plain wooden cell on the edge of the forest, at a slight distance from the convent. For a time, Pelagia collected large stones, rolling them willy-nilly into the cell she shared with Anna. She slept in the dirt by the open door, stepped upon, spat at, taunted. Like naughty children, Diveyevo’s nuns devised sly tricks and impious pranks to torment their demented sister. No longer was the question how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but how many evil nuns can jump up and down upon the prostrate body of Pelagia as she howled and whimpered with delight? How scalding can the well water be that they dribble over her head, drenching the foul, unwashed tree roots of her once-yellow hair?

Done with hauling rocks, Pelagia began sailing bricks into a murky frog pond, wading in up to her broad hips before hurling them back onto shore again. She didn’t mind the army of emboldened frogs who hopped into her cell and hunkered, croaking voluptuously, in damp, foul corners. One day, Anna, who had had enough, swept the frogs, like so many green, slimy doorknobs, into a pile, tossed them out by their legs, then locked Pelagia inside. Holy Folly retaliated by pulling the door off its hinges, setting it on fire, and sitting in the pond overnight. After that, the two women dwelt in their forest cell, undoored, exposed to brutal Russian winters and insect-plagued summers. Hear, too, that Pelagia never bathed or trimmed her huge, filthy finger- or toenails, and was impervious to cockroaches, those shiny, black revulsions of the devil, skittering across the unhygienic humps and hummocks, the hairy tussock of her unwashed body.

In time, a succession of miracles began to occur. Anna witnessed Pelagia deliberately jump upon a board with a great iron nail sticking up from it, driving the rusted point straight through her high, naked arch. Rushing off to slap together a black-bread-and-onion poultice, Anna returned to find no mark at all, not even a red dot, on Pelagia’s stinking, sprouting potato of a foot.

As soon as Pelagia took to roundly thrashing herself with switches and sticks, a second Holy Fool, a fellow Arzamasian, Theodore Mikhailovich Solovyov, showed up, and with Anna looking on (quite terrified but willing to be glorified by martyrdom), the two, matched in girth, began a fierce dueling of sticks and warring words. Like actors in some divine improvisation, they fought with clubs and branches, hurling insults like flaming javelins, like lightning bolts, as they chased one another back and forth through the cell and into the Church of the Nativity cemetery.

When the bruised and muddied Pelagia began uttering streams of pure clairvoyance, pilgrims straggled then elbowed their way into Diveyevo from far and near to be blessed, healed, beaten, and screamed at. She predicted dates of birth and, far more often, death, and on the day Sergei Vasileivich, some hundreds of miles distant, fell mortally ill, Pelagia mimed her old husband’s agony and howled like a wolf the instant his soul broke free from his spent, vainglorious body. Even the tsar, dressed in the clichéd disguise of a woodcutter, made his way on foot through the forest to seek counsel from the reputed saint, later claiming she was the one person who would talk with him forthrightly and without guile. Still, when she warned him of his downfall, he did not listen, which proves that even in the presence of a seer and a saint, people hear only what they want to hear.

On they came in droves, day and night, seeking out the vile, stinksome creature sitting on her felt mat, asking their Matrushka what they should do about this or that or the other. To one she might scream Hussy! and deliver a stinging slap to the cheek along with a riddle; to another she might coo a lullaby, tender a silky caress. Wealth and rank offered no insulation from her unpredictable clairvoyance. When venerable Vladyka Nectary paid an unannounced visit, Pelagia stood waiting faithfully for him in a blinding hailstorm, yet when he named a replacement for Diveyevo’s abbess, she boxed both his ears, making of him a perfect devotee, her faithful one.

Eating only raw mushrooms, Pelagia hoarded the many offerings of sweets she received. Candies, cakes, prosphora, all were stuffed into in a lumpy homemade sack, or storehouse, which hung from her neck, bending her by its dulcet, rotting weight, nearly to the ground. In Pelgia’s final years, Anna Gerasimovna began to wake nights to find their cell on holy fire with the terrifying radiance of supernatural visitors. Father Seraphim, many years dead and a venerated saint, arrived to administer the sacraments, and Anna claimed to have seen with her own eyes an angelic being descend through the roof, whisk Pelagia off in its alien arms, and return her, babbling incoherently, at dawn.

In the winter of 1879, Anna Gerasimovna woke one morning to find Pelagia outside, standing near the edge of the forest, in extreme austerity, an orant, arms upraised, wearing only her sarafan, a long, sleeveless undergarment, its thin hem nailed by ice to the snowy crown of earth. A caryatid made of flesh and ice, Pelagia upheld, for one complete night, the harsh, sorrowing, human world.

In January, 1884, she contracted a high fever and, enclasped by a dry, withering rosary of nuns, seemed one moment to battle invisible demons, the next to be lifted up in beatific rapture. At the last, she raised her head a little, its golden nimbus stinking of manure, frogs, and rotten cakes, cried O, Mother of God! then fell back, asleep in the Lord, upon her pillow of iron shackles. An ocean of candles flared up throughout Russia. Panakhi-das for the dead Pelagia were held everywhere, and overnight painted icons, mosaics, carved panels of ivory and cloisonné enamels, images of Pelagia, Fool-for-Christ, sprang up like summer stars. Thousands mourned Matrushka, their holy mother. Thousands whirled in keening ecstasy.

In 1927, Communist soldiers, neither toys nor made of wax, closed down the monastery at Sarov, the convent at Diveyevo, and desecrated Pelagia’s cell and grave. Late in the 1980s, with Gorbachev’s perestroika policy (An emperor! Look! Dissolving his own empire!) both churches were restored and reopened. Today, anyone can take the train from Moscow to Diveyevo, walk the same paths as Pelagia, look up at the same vacant sky and admire the forest, little changed.

Three Morals

I.

According to legend, a seventh-century pagan chieftain, Damon, from County Tyrone, Ireland, went mad upon the death of his wife and decided to assuage his grief by marrying his own daughter. Horrified by her father’s advances, Dymphna, in the company of her elderly priest and confessor, Saint Gerebernus, fled across the sea to Belgium. The two took refuge and lived as hermits in an oratory in Geel, in the province of Antwerp. Damon’s spies tracked the pair down, and after ordering the death of the old priest, the king took up his own sword and beheaded his disobedient child. Locals entombed the two in a nearby cave, and in the thirteenth century, when the sarcophagi were discovered, healings from mental illness and epilepsy began to take place. Saint Dymphna, virgin and martyr, became Geel’s patron saint of insanity, of mental illness, of sleepwalking, of nervous disorders, of incest victims, of those possessed, of princesses, of epileptics and runaways. Images of Dymphna depict her being beheaded by her father or praying in a cloud surrounded by a group of lunatics bound with golden chains, or as a princess with a sword holding the devil, fettered, on a leash. Today, Dymphna’s remains are in a silver reliquary in Geel’s church of Saint Dymphna. Her feast day is May 15. Under her patronage, Geel’s inhabitants are known for the care they give the mentally ill. An infirmary was first built in the thirteenth century, and today, the city boasts a first-class sanitarium, one of the largest, most efficient colonies for lunatics in the world and the first to start a peculiar but strangely curative program. First, the insane are admitted to the sanitarium for observation, and then they are placed in the homes of Geel’s farmers and city residents where they are treated kindly, welcomed as family members, and watched over without ever being aware of it.

Today, in Geel, you will find the insane living side by side with the sane, eating at the same tables, working in pastry shops, car repair shops, driving buses, and quite often standing in crosswalks, holding out signs to stop traffic so Geel’s children can safely cross their streets to school. (The tale of Saint Dymphna, a narrative variant of the popular legend of a king who desires to marry his own daughter, is without historical foundation.)

II.

On October 11, 2007, a young man, nude but for one black sock, strolled serenely through Times Square. While speaking into his cell phone, the curly-haired hipster, later identified as Josh Drimmer, age twenty-six, a playwright and Yale alum from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, zigzagged back and forth along Seventh Avenue between West Forty-seventh and Forty-eighth Streets. After exiting Tad’s Steakhouse off Forty-seventh Street where patrons reported seeing a naked man jump up and down on one of the restaurant’s tables, Mr. Drimmer was arrested and handcuffed by the police. When his clothing, including a pair of plaid boxers, a blue polo shirt, brown ankle-high boots, and a second black sock, were delivered to him, Drimmer refused to put them on. He was a pretty strange guy, said a former college acquaintance. Crazy. He would do weird things, like eat scraps of food people had left around for a couple of hours. Following his arrest, Mr. Drimmer was carted off to Bellevue Hospital. I have no knowledge of why any of this has happened, said his father from his home in Chicago.

Adapted from The New York Post, October 12, 2007

III.

Objects, while appearing solid, are 99.9999 percent empty space. Chaos directs us to a higher order. Past and future do not exist. Dimensions are multiple and time can be traveled. These are the teachings of physics.

Think, child!

Be a spire of light! Go unwashed, speak in tongues.

Idiota! Saloi! Yuradivye!

Look both ways!

Spin.

WATANYA CICILIA

Will you help me pin my frock? The world turns round in a day.

—NOAH WEBSTER, The Elementary Spelling Book— being an improvement on The American Spelling Book, 1857

Darke County Infirmary

Greenville, Ohio

August 13, 1870

Phoebe Ann Moses left off sewing cuffs and collars of oil-boiled turkey-red cloth on orphans’ jackets and waited in the doorway of the infirmary’s parlor. The people who had summoned her, two men and a woman, stood starkly framed inside a square of window light with its short view of a bowed, planked road and longer view of the heat-scorched woodland beyond. They had worked out the details of her fate like a simple sum, and wore somber, drab clothes like leafless trees, dark elms, even in late summer, the tired air outside whirring with the metallic din of cicadas. She had been brought to this poor county farm two weeks before, and today, her tenth birthday, the Edingtons had found someone to take her. Moses-Poses, a worm-riddled crab apple none wanted, passed from hand to hand, the hand about to take her now leading up a plough-muscled arm to a scrawny rooster’s neck and face both flat and dipped-in as a pie pan. The man turned his straw hat around and around in his grimed fingers, a nervy, delicate rotation . . . housework she heard him say, farm chores light enough so the girl will have time for her schooling, for the hunting and trapping of small game.

In homes left fatherless and destitute, it was not unusual for children like Phoebe Ann Moses and her baby sister, Hulda, to be given away. Either that or thee will starve, Annie, her mother’s hands settled with resigned weight on her daughter’s shoulders.

In too-big shoes cut from a calf’s tanned hide, stitched with that same calf’s dried sinew, she set the filthy pine planks of the parlor floor creaking as she crossed the room for his inspection, a close, scuffing sound set against the disquieting mass of sharp-singing cicadas. She kept her eyes down as the Edingtons offered a relieved farewell (like her mother, one less mouth), and down even more as she followed the man’s high, cavalry-like boots, clods of dirt, like an uneven sowing of black seed, dropping away from the worn heels, out into the afternoon’s alkaline glare, smelling of gravel dust, souring vegetation, and the pinched vinegar- sweetness of ripe crab apples. The talk was all of cicadas, silver-winged, glistening, the brown-liquor stench of their bodies littering the orchard, legions and legions of them, a Biblical swarm blighting the land, their spirited shrilling in the hottest parts of the day, and of the English-imported sparrows, the crow-blackbirds, vireos and robins, all natural enemies who devoured them.

He urged but did not help her into the buckboard, and not onto the seat beside him, but like a pig hauled for doom, into the straw-littered splintering bed of the wagon. In the man’s coiled-tight tones she caught the first chill, like a snap of ice from tree limbs, but worse than ice, for his nature would never warm or thaw toward her. He drove his pair of horses, bloat-bellied, splay-footed bays, away from the red brick infirmary, the kindly Edingtons en-coupled and shrinking inside their front doorway, waving as if she were off through bursting cornfields and heavy-laden orchards to something fine, not moving impossibly further from her soft-spoken Quaker mother, from the cool, green, and game-filled woods she loved to roam, hunt, lose herself in. The farmer offered neither word nor water even as he drank, his whiskered throat pulsing in an ugly way when he turned to look back at her.

He unharnessed his sorry team, not helping her step down from the wagon with her little bundle, a secondhand linsey dress, a copy and spelling book, treasures she had found, unused, in the infirmary’s classroom, more a spare place for storage of unwanted chairs, desks, and books unopened than for any instruction. Inside the tenebrous, stifling gloom of his house, he put one hand like an order against her back, drove her toward an unsmiling woman with a lean, long face, in whose pin-elbowed arms was cupped a baby, its pruny face bewildered, its mewling a fretful warning.

What name?

She’ll go by Annie.

The drained, ignorant smell of that house, the way sunlight snuck in through the windows, defeated by the time it hung, milky and bleak, over the coarseness inside, never left her. In future years, if asked, she would refer to the man and woman who had enslaved her only as he-wolf, and she-wolf. She almost never spoke of that time, though she would be admired for her quiet, constant charity to orphans, much of her fortune given away for their care and for the proper schooling of young, indigent girls.

Savage nations inhabit huts and wigwams. The troops march to the sound of the drum. The sun illuminates our world.

—NOAH WEBSTER, The Elementary Spelling Book, 1857

Rosebud Creek, Montana

The Moon of Making Fat

June, 1876

Jumping Bull, the young Assiniboin he had adopted as a brother, took up a sharpened awl of buffalo bone. Starting from the wrist, he methodically