Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 16 (7 page)

All but Etna's most tuber-like hearts stirred in those midsummer weeks.

Yet we felt threatened by our own infatuation, as if we were handling a dangerous explosive or an ornate blade. Amidst this vertigo, the influence of a competing feeling arose, an alkaline counter-emotion: shame. The knowledge that something so foolish could mean so very much to us was withering. We feared the extent of our adoration would be detected not only by those insensate critics like Archie but also our neighbors and friends. How we openly complained to them about defaced property even while we suspected they too bit their lower lips when they heard the words
Artemisia Guile.
How we didn't want anyone to know. So the Artemisiac salons came about to suffocate this feeling. There our individual names and faces fell away into something vaster and darker, like so much snow falling over the Lake.

Bill Bliss understood our needs.

Towards the end of June, when the clouds disappeared from the sky and bright white summer arrived, he collected the first items that would make up his Artemisiana museum. Into his care we commended our photographs of the Milwaukee Street Banners and the Water Street Bridge Message; copies of the strange fliers we'd found stuffed in our mailboxes; the German Club Toilet Paper Roll, and the blue and white “AG” flag seen flying one morning on the pole at Town Hall. Cynics asked him why he bothered.

"It's all going into an archive,” he told us. “Wouldn't it be neat to see all of these pieces together at once?"

Marty Tang, who would go on to become Anticipation Coordinator of the Cumberland Street orthodox salon, where he invented the anticipation games known as “Steeple” and “Eight Pace,” accused Bliss of hoarding. But enthusiasm grew among true believers for this idea of a quiet, air-conditioned room, pleasantly lit and open to the public, where Etna might at last piece all her communications together. He understood us.

But Archie Idlewilde inveighed against it. “Burn the rubbish,” he wrote. “Larding a room with souvenirs of vandalism is a perfect testament to our bovine propensities. There are only two mysteries in town. Number one, why the cops can't catch this con. Number two, why the citizens of Etna have become so determined to find meaning in nonsense."

On the Fourth of July, we all came down to the lakefront to see the fireworks. Shortly after nine o'clock, in the middle of the show, a salvo of six rockets streaked up into the dark blue night and detonated in quick succession. They flowered into green and gold words that seemed to be arriving at great velocity from outer space:

Frenzied conversations erupted, scenes of arm-waving and head-scratching. Cries like “Did you see what I saw?” and “No way!” were heard. Illegible, conventional fireworks resumed, as if nothing unexpected had happened. The show continued in denial. Thunderous pauses broke up our ecstasy of questions, stranding us from moment to moment in our own silent perplexities. Those not yet captivated by her now swooned. The display had been tampered with, Chief Neuget later explained to Randy Michaelmas. A professional hand must have inserted the six rockets of the Fireworks Accusation seamlessly into the pre-arranged show. This professional was never found.

Archie Idlewilde was elsewhere on the Fourth. Far across town on Bay Lane near the freight railroad tracks, he was at work in the basement apartment he rented from the Willowicks. We heard that Archie left home after graduation to live alone for a few months in a fluorescent-lit cellar furnished with a prodigious number of old couches. Though his relationship with his parents was informal if not exactly tender, he insisted on private space, believing that great work can only be achieved in absolute solitude. Archie claimed to be at work on an exhaustive history of imaginary historical persons, we learned from a Mr. Pangallo, his old history teacher. He spoke of Archie's history essays as exemplary student scholarship despite their aloof tone. There was a good one on a correspondence between Prester John and King Arthur in the minds of thirteenth-century French and English crusaders. Pangallo had kept a copy of this essay for his own records and now began circulating it amongst his friends. In it, Archie argued that these “nonexistent figures” represented psychological projections “of the banal sort. The predictable chivalric sentiment of morally blighted, hypocritical communities."

While Etna wandered home under the street lamps, pondering the suggestion of the Fireworks Accusation—that Artemisia Guile might know us better than we know ourselves—Archie Idlewilde labored underground in secret, probably searching for the right words to break her spell. He never understood.

For thirteen days, between the Fourth and July 17, we saw a spike in Artemisiana, a burst that some construed as the last push before a revelation. Chalked sidewalks, spray-painted walls, carved-up trees, even a gatorboard-mounted poster tacked up on the side of Town Hall. She even struck the Perry Monument in Veteran's Plaza early on a Sunday morning, painting across the bronze breast the Perry Assertion: “FALL FOR ARTEMISIA GUILE.” Then, without explanation, when we were never more raw with curiosity, when we were about to burst with the urgency of Artemisia Guile—she fell silent.

"I can't help but be reminded of my kid brother,” Archie wrote, applauding the apparent demise of the Artemisia Guile hoax, “who after playing with a new toy for a few weeks, wears out all the fun in it, and tosses the toy aside in favor of the next new thing."

Bill Bliss’ timeline calls this period of abstinence the Hiatus.

Our lives went on without her. Bright haze confused the sky. The town steeped in humidity. The winds shut down. Hiatus afternoons were oppressively bright and viscous. At the Merwin Building, we came to work in T-shirts and shorts, then changed in the bathrooms into fresh dress shirts and blouses, trousers and skirts. In the evenings we found the stillness and the lonesome silence of late July unbearable. Cases of insomnia continued to climb and midnight pacing became more prevalent. Half-awake on our sofas we watched late night television till three or four in the morning, either unwilling or unable to go to bed. During those embarrassing weeks of the Hiatus, we sat up waiting for that unforeseen event, something perhaps on television, perhaps out in the street. No matter how intently we waited, it never came. Every night we were let down and went to bed ashamed for having waited up. It was a matter of desiring, at the end of busy workdays, something we could not yet lay a finger on. ‘Til this day, it's deeply embarrassing for many of us. Lately it has become popular amongst Archie Idlewilde's ilk to say that we knew all along just what we were up to. The shame, they say, was like a brilliant light shining through the frame of a closed door.

The salons took our longing out of the closet and off the hanger. They began in mid-July in the affluent new neighborhoods to the south of Etna, most notably in the home of Miles and Vera Rosentraum. To understand the salons, you must forget the substance of Artemisiana—the toilet paper, the chalk, the paint, all that rubbish that fueled our shame—and give into the heady air of her messages. In those development neighborhoods of kidney-shaped pools and plane trees, Artemisia Guile became an enthralling game. On June 30 the Rosentraums had hosted a “Furs & Masks” party. The invitations informed us that Artemsia Guile would be the guest of honor. To no one's surprise,
she
did not arrive. Instead, at midnight through the front door strode the audacious Nina Rosentraum, home after her first year of college, wearing only Celtic-blue body paint and a white Brazilian bikini.

These parties were not yet salons in the strictest sense, if we adhere to Bill Bliss’ definition. Only once Vera and Miles and friends concluded that their orgiastic method was the best way of relating to Artemisia Guile, did they become Etna's first Artemisiac salon. Encouraging lust, prostration, gluttony, and licentious obsession, the Rosentraum's and similar adoration salons came first. But the Hiatus triggered a boom. Soon every street had a salon of its own sort. There were contemplative salons on Lake Street, Pelican Street, and Adelphia Road, where yoga and meditation protracted and extenuated our longing. At a small house on Cumberland, Marty Tang introduced us to the staples of Etna's orthodox salons: anticipation games. Orthodox Artemisiacs filled empty hours with these games and deep-diaphragm sighing. A firm believer in privacy and modesty, Tang explained rules and methods for a few hours each Saturday morning then sent us home with pamphlets and photocopies of his hand-drawn illustrations. A whole evening, we discovered, could be passed just twiddling one's thumbs or pacing without any expectation of satisfaction, excitement, or even companionship.

While these salons prescribed ways of living with Artemisia Guile, the liberal salons gave us the chance to discuss her. Some of us wanted simply to say her name and smile. According to Bliss, these comfortable gatherings accounted for no less than eighty percent of the salons. What else did we want on those purgatorial nights but to stroll down the sidewalk through the lamplight shadows of trees to a place where we could sit together in living rooms or out on porches with our similarly afflicted friends while chatting and sipping chamomile tea or a little neat bourbon.

Hundreds of square white envelopes arrived in mailboxes across Etna on August 2. These were invitations to the opening of Bill Bliss’ attic museum. Our moods picked up. Meanwhile, squadrons of gulls flew in from the lake and bivouacked in our parking lots. It was raining in Detroit and Chicago. Overhead purple and steel-gray decks of clouds shuffled perilously. Then came a turn of events. On August 6, fax machines across Etna whined to life and printed a single sheet transmission from a blocked ID. Centered on this page was an enormous serif “AG.” Then, fortuitously, it rained. The national news mistook the storm's genre, calling it epic, while we knew for sure it was an expression of our town's languishing heart. Those dark cloud decks came down one after another on Etna, the whole of the sky collapsing over the course of two days. Basements flooded and attics leaked. Birds were washed out of the skies, moles rinsed from their homes in the earth. Sewers choked. Lightning struck both the WKET antenna and little Dominick Turtelli, who liked to play with coat hangers.

After two days the storm subsided, the sky wearing out near four o'clock. A blueness appeared through the drifting panels of cloud. Those of us driving north that evening from GeoPlastics and the St. Lawrence Hospital were the first to witness the Rain Message, now more popularly known as the Finale. Painted in uniform black letters across the cheek of the pale green water tower that overlooks the interstate, the Finale read, “DREAM OF ME ALWAYS—INFINITE AG.” The police later reported that the size and font of the typographic template used to produce the Finale were identical to those in the Water Street Bridge Message. Though smaller chalkings and markings still persist to this day, she never again spoke to us on such a scale.

Explanations have circulated widely among Etna's skeptics and lampoonists—the crowd Mary Tang's orthodox Artemisiacs call “non-anticipators.” Proponents of the Idlewilde Conjecture argue that we are unwilling to risk the effort to produce such messages. The majority of us, however, express a disinterest in post-Hiatus Artemisiana. Could it be that during her abstinence, when we felt so abandoned, our anticipation fermented into the nostalgia that makes the Bliss Museum so compelling?

It opened to the public on a wet, mid-August Sunday afternoon. To allow a steady flow through the wide attic above the Bliss’ Victorian home, the exhibit was structured in a clockwise path following the chronology of events. Light from the dormer windows was too dim, especially in the corners and along the outside walls. In this faint light, the attic's paisley wallpaper made some of us uneasy. When we looked up from the collection we were certain that the patterns on the wallpaper had altered itself slightly or somehow shifted positions, scurrying like cockroaches behind our backs. This discomfiture has become a trademark of the Bliss Museum of Artemisiana.

In the living room a little while later, we ate hors d'oeuvres and drank glasses of Cabernet and Pinot Grigio while Bliss made a little speech. He thanked Etna, particularly his best friends and dear Elizabeth. Raising his glass, he toasted, “To friends and the wonders of the world.” His daughters, hiding between their father's legs, gulped apple juice spiked with tonic water. Then we ate the olives, cold cuts, cheese slices, and crackers the size of credit cards.

Visitors to the Museum often linger at the far end of the attic, in the garret. Two photographs face each other all day long in the greenish maple-filtered light that comes in through the garret's window. To one side is the famous black and white photo of the Water Street Bridge Message. Opposite is a hurried color snapshot of Nina Rosentraum in her infamous body paint, taken as she neared the swimming pool. In a few moments, she'll mount the diving board, stand on the tips of her toes, and with arms spread wide, command us to “Adore Artemisia Guile!” before running, bouncing, and somersaulting into her parents’ spectrally-lit pool.

On the first Thursday of September, Archie's last letter ran in the
Sun-Gazette.
“I would like to present a conjecture,” he wrote just before leaving town. “We treat the Idlewilde Conjecture like a lurid wreck.” Very simply, Archie claimed that we, the population of Etna, Ohio, have nurtured and propagated our own mystery.
We
created Artemisia Guile, he said.
We
committed all the acts of midnight graffiti and scribbling and banner-hanging. “I see there being, at first, only one or two graffitists who worked quietly in the shadows, preoccupied with a name as hollow as a barrel but so very arcane. The name then struck someone else, probably without the knowledge of the initiators. This newcomer made his own little graffito. Soon another someone got involved, then another, then another until that number of participants had grown exponentially.” We each made our individual contributions, however minor, he said, merely by secretly inking her name here or there. “This explains the professionalism of some of the signage,” Archie continued. “Experts were involved. Painters can be blamed for the Water Street Bridge Message, printers for the Milwaukee Banners. It was a serial job for which everyone must bear some of the blame."