The Ghosts of Grace Cathedral: "Father, Son and Holy Ghost"

CHAPTER 1

He cracked an eyelid open to see if daylight might help erase his hangover. For several minutes, he lay on his back staring at the ceiling, dazed in the afterglow of soul-wrenching ecstasy. He started to doze but suddenly pulled himself upright in bed as though recoiling from a rattlesnake bite. A blurry recollection sent him bolting into the guestroom. He nudged his old professor who was sleeping crosswise on the bed cradling an empty wine bottle under one arm.

Sam uttered, Yes, yes, it is your father’s brain. Yes, in the pickle jar.

Carl sprang out of the room and confronted his wife who was vacuuming in the hallway.

Is no longer in this house! she yelled over the whine of her carpet cleaner.

Then where in the hell is it? he shouted.

In trash can where it belongs!

You! You threw my father’s brain in the . . . trash can?

"Jawohl! On top of the spoiled sauerkraut!"

Shit! Carl said, tripping down the stairs two at a time.

He dashed through the kitchen and threw open the back door. His eyes darted to the trash can at the foot of the stairs. Bolting down them, he flung the lid off with a clatter. His eyes fell upon the jar, its contents gray and convoluted.

Shivering in the cold rain, he reached out his hands as he had as a boy to his father and gently retrieved the jar and held it close to his face trying to understand the clinical reality of it and the ineffable epiphany of the moment. It was a stark incongruity, and it terrified him.

He heard his daughter calling, and he looked up to see Vivian standing in the open doorway with her hands on her hips. Her eyes were wide in disbelief.

Dad! What are you doing out there in the rain?

Carl grasped the jar and ascended the stairs.

What in the world? she exclaimed as he darted past her.

Meet your grandfather, and get the hell out of the way! Carl said. As he passed her, Vivian adroitly snatched the jar from his wet grasp. She turned her back to him and held the jar up to the light.

Carl reached for it. Sorry your fiancé saw me trash-pickin’ in my Skivvies!

Yes, next time please get dressed, she said tersely.

That’s all right, Professor. I won’t spread it around; I’d like to have people think I’m marrying into class, David said.

What do you mean meet my grandfather? Vivian asked. Carl glared at David, but his anger melted when he realized no one had clout-dressed in their underwear even though thirty-seven-year-old David already looked like a fragile old man. Carl spun around, retrieved the jar, and kissed his daughter’s forehead.

When he reached the top of the stairs, he found Professor Stone making his way down with Irmgard at his heels, her vacuum flopping on the steps behind her. When she saw the jar, she waved Carl back. I vill have no brains in mine house! she screamed.

Then you’ll have to live here alone! Carl said.

As Professor Stone passed Carl, he spoke into his ear, If you want to survive, you better haul ass!

Vivian came to the kitchen doorway and watched the rigmarole going on the stairway. David Lester came up behind her and placed his hands on her hips. When he giggled, she pushed his hands away.

Vivian Tooley, twenty-three, a graduate paleoanthropologist, was close to her father and often visited his neurology class. Her mother, she felt, was eroding family peace and alienating them by her obsessive housecleaning and nit-picking. She squinted her brown eyes and grimaced at the scene unfolding before her. She was amused – and embarrassed. Here was Professor Stone in the guestroom, who, according to her mother, was sleeping it off.

By the time Carl arrived at the professor’s apartment, he was exhausted and fell into an easy chair. Byjesus, is it really his goddamn brain?

Sam handed him a letter and when Carl finished reading it he looked up and his face was blanched. I never believed he committed suicide, he uttered.

Neither did I.

Brain glow? Do you know what the hell Dr. Domintrope was talking about? Carl asked, swatting the page.

Yes, I think I know what he was getting at.

And the notebooks Domintrope referred to – 

Paddy’s wife might have them. She had a nervous breakdown when he was killed in the war.

She would be a very old lady by now, Carl said ruefully. Tell me everything you know.

Sam proceeded to tell Carl how he had come in possession of his father’s traumatized brain forty years after his death!

CHAPTER 2

Professor Stone related how chagrined he had been to receive a package on Tuesday with a jar containing a human brain. It had a bullet hole in the right frontal lobe which had apparently caused the demise of its owner. This was the first time Sam had held a human brain outside the aegis of his laboratory, and his eighty-two-year-old heart had given a discordant beat.

He pointed to the faded postmark which some World War II postal clerk had dutifully stamped: 1 Apr 1944.

Carl looked at the jar containing his father’s brain. He grimaced in revulsion just as he had in dissection class when Professor Stone with audacious scalpel enucleated an eyeball, eviscerated a kidney, a heart, or a brain.

Sam explained how he and Abner Wentworth, a neighbor and friend, had been appalled about receiving such a macabre parcel at their residence – mailed to Sam four decades before!

I agreed with Abner; it was something out of a Poe horror story. And it was Abner who brought to my attention that the first of April is April Fool’s Day! At that point we figured it was a joke, Sam said.

"But then Abner told me he’d seen one of my daughters pulling out of my parking space that morning. I was furious that Dora – God bless her soul – had kept the package in our attic all those years and had never mentioned it to me. Then, with the kids moving into the empty house, they’d discovered the package. Betty, the best of the lot, had, with more propriety in mind than curiosity, delivered it, unopened. It seems more like a goddamn conspiracy than forgetfulness.

But of course, Dora just plain forgot. She had a terrible memory and an odd contempt about anything that belonged to me. God bless her.

Carl stiffened as he read the coroner’s forty-year-old pathology report regarding his father’s death:

December 10, 1943

Los Angeles, Calif.

Dear Sam:

I am departing tomorrow for Walter Reed Army Hospital preparatory for assignment to the ETO. I have instructed Lydia to deliver this exhibit A specimen (Harry Tooley’s brain) to you at home in case something should happen to me. I am not satisfied the way the police handled his death, and I know you weren’t either. If I must go to my Maker in this war, I want this off my conscience; and this is the only way I have of doing so.

In God we trust,

Paddy

Sam took the letter from Carl’s unsteady hand and replaced it with a cup of steaming coffee. Wartime anxiety took the focus off Harry’s death. Who gave a damn about another depressed doctor doing himself in while General Patton chased the Krauts across Europe and world headlines?

Paddy Domintrope’s official pathology report was terse and painfully clinical; and as Carl read it aloud, he had an unnerving image of the pathologist bending over his father’s corpse.

The top of the skull is sawed through and removed, exposing the brain. A copious amount of sanguineous fluid spills out. The cerebral cortex is traumatized and edematous with contra-coup lesions seen on the right frontal lobe and superior surfaces of the cerebral commissure. Two fragments of soft gray metal that I assume to be lead (later confirmed to be lead from a single .25 caliber cartridge with an 87-gram bullet) are found lodged at the superior margin of the right zygoma. It is obvious that the lethal projectile entered below the left side of the occiput and emerged at the zygoma. The exit is twice as large as the entrance wound. This shows that the bullet entered the brain from the rear and not from the front as Sheriff Woodhouse claimed in his report. Also, Dr. Tooley was dextromanual, and it is inconceivable and incongruous that he would use his left hand to discharge the weapon. Even if that were the case, the angle/axis of trajectory was such that it would require an exaggerated and strained position of his arm and wrist. Why someone would go through such contortions at the door of self-destruction is, again, inconceivable. Therefore, it is my professional opinion that Dr. Harry Tooley did not commit suicide.

Ipso Facto:

1)    Contrecoup is found at the front of the brain indicating that entry wound is at the left side of occipital bone.

2)    The anterior wound is the larger wound indicating that the bullet, having flattened itself at the rear of the skull, emerged larger than when it entered it.

3)    Two fragments of the bullet were found at the front exit wound.

4)    The positioning of the wrist and arm would make it inordinate and difficult to discharge the weapon.

Paddy Domintrope, MD

Deputy Medical Examiner/Coroner

*     *     *

Why would someone kill a university professor? Carl asked.

Someone didn’t like what he was professing.

Byjesus! Carl closed his eyes and sat back in his chair. He wanted, more than anything, to go to sleep and wake up and find it had all been a dream – this goddamn pickle jar with his father’s brain jammed into it!

Sam ran his hands over his head and sweaty neck. Harry was into . . . how the brain stored memories and what happened to them after one – he drew a breath – died.

Carl looked up to Sam. Freud, Pavlov, Laski, and Penfield were brain investigators; and they weren’t murdered.

And so were Broca, Rasmussen, and Wernicke. But you see, Carl, your father claimed he could reproduce memories stored in a dead brain! Experiment changed to exploitation, heralding dangerous implications.

Carl sat up and again looked at the jar on Sam’s table. At the time everyone thought he had lost touch with reality.

That would call for the Nobel Prize, not a goddamn hole in the head, Carl said.

Well, no one took his work seriously.

Except for whoever killed him, Carl said.

Sam swallowed two more aspirins.

Couldn’t the same thing happen to someone trying to exhume his work? Carl asked.

Sam dropped his swollen hands onto the table. Maybe – if his killer’s still alive.

Carl sat up in his chair. You’re still alive, and so are some of your colleagues!

Sam shrugged and continued with his narrative.

I was beside myself; I didn’t know what to do. I couldn’t bring myself to being the delivery boy of your father’s brain! Not to mention Paddy’s incredible imputation. So, like a naive bride on her wedding night, I went to Franklin University seeking advice from the Old Guard. I am still smarting over Dean Heller’s and Professor Zimmermann’s acidulous condemnation for what I was doing and Heller’s remark about me peddling an old laboratory brain and a shit-ass story that could have me institutionalized! That’s when that sumbitch really pissed me off!

Carl shrugged, recalling the many years Heller had been at Franklin Medical Center long enough that he seemed to have become a physical part of its existence. The deteriorating old edifice and its turn-of-the-century architecture of stone, wood, and concrete and dirty bricks made it look like an eighteenth-century factory; a sore thumb and an anachronism among the recent high rises, it looked more like a fortress than a university. It even sprouted turrets and embattled parapets.

Carl would never forget the tunnels with the rank effluvium and stench of their old and beloved chemistry lab and the poignant, acrid, putrid, redolent, rancid, moldy, musty, and fetid odors of the dissection lab where they used to keep their precious cadavers in a decrepit clinkety-clankety old hotel walk-in refrigerator.

"Your father never told me what he was experimenting with, saying only that it had to do with that gooey stuff between the ears. Later, Paddy Domintrope mentioned how he and your father ran into this latent bioluminescent phenomenon of postmortem brains, whatever that was supposed to mean.

He asked your father what the rumors were all about, but all your father would say was how great it would be if one’s memories were an indelible pen not necessarily subject to death’s indiscriminate eraser and could, with an electrochemical contrivance, play back its inestimable treasures for the enlightenment of mankind!

Then Sam repeated Paddy’s remark. What if old hole-in-the-head Tooley had had his ass in gear after all?

Carl grimaced, and Sam shrugged in apology and said, I don’t think Paddy shared this with Dean Heller.

Carl remembered how the dean had worked his way up the pristine university hierarchy. These past fifteen years he was fighting retirement, and the youthful board of governors was anxious and eager to appoint one of their own to the chair. But Heller was too proud to admit to his escalating infirmities. His strict adherence to pedantry was beginning to stir the campus dissidents to open rebellion. They’d chiseled a swastika in his solid oak office door and hung condoms from tree branches outside his office window signifying, they said, that he was a prick. At the time, the incident made Carl chuckle.

Imagine him threatening to institutionalize me! You think Max would go along with that? Sam asked.

Max had always been a recluse. But what psychiatrist isn’t? Carl recalled how Max had changed over the years. His appellation of psychoanalyst had corrupted to the ignoble barb of shrink during the midsixties. Zimmermann thought that it damaged the status and prestige of his profession. Psychiatry was being booted around like an empty aspirin tin, like Freud was. Freud, the Oedipus Tyrannous.

Carl recalled when the kids wrote Sigmoid Fraud on Max’s blackboard over the message: The best use of da psychoanalyst’s couch is for da fucking, da fellatio, and da funnylingus.

"When I walked into Dean Heller’s office, I almost fell over when I smelled the odors of the old laboratory and morgue. Damn it, Carl, it stank like dead bodies were still in the room. Our talk was almost amiable until I told him about our four-decade-old parcel. Then he abandoned his phony perspicacious front – saliva drooled down his chin.

You’re too young to remember, Carl, but your father’s death dealt the college a near-mortal blow, shaking its foundations since your father and Dr. Franklin founded the damn place in the first place. His so-called suicide took a long time to get over, not to mention his aberration with the brain thing. Well, it was eventually forgotten – until now. So according to Heller, there I was, breaking wind, and the wind was blowing on them all. Heller said, ‘I knew that son of a bitch was experimenting with brains, and I told him to stop it. It all began with that shining-brain crap.’

Carl shook his head. He tried to understand, but he couldn’t. Maybe he didn’t want to. His father told him to first digest and then, and only then, investigate, never vice versa.

"I told him Paddy thought Harry was murdered and that I believed he was right. I asked him if he’d read his report. He brought his hand down on the desk like a guillotine blade which severed our already-tenuous relationship. Carl, his face turned fire engine red, and his eyes bulged like Ping-Pong balls. I never saw him so incendiary and disintegrated.

He told me to tote Harry’s goddamn brain up there so he could flush it down the toilet! ‘For the sake of the college!’ he screamed. I said, ‘Bullshit! This is beyond the college and beyond the grave!’

"He wiped his face and sat back in his chair trying to recapture some composure it seemed. He’d forced his face into a paternal smile as he reminded me of my alma mater and my innate sense of duty and propriety.

I told him to screw the alma mater, and he stood up and circled a finger at his temple and said, ‘Domintrope was wrong in sending you Tooley’s brain forty years ago, and you are out of your mind forty years later in trying to exhume the lunacy that goes with it. I won’t have this university discredited by scandal, especially an old scandal that by attrition has earned decent obscurity.’

‘Murder is not decently obscured, it’s only covered up,’ I reminded him. By then he was foaming at the mouth. ‘The fool thought he could tap a dead man’s memories. The devil possesses the flesh, but the mind belongs to God!’ he sputtered as he stood tottering at the top of the stairs, his voice echoing down the stairwell. ‘He was giving too much attention to someone who was merely loony. If God had to be brought into it, Harry Tooley couldn’t have been too loony.’

Sam said his visit to Max Zimmermann was somber and related how the psychiatrist had dropped his head and stared at his hands as he ran one fingernail under the other. Sam said he was startled at Zimmermann’s contrived likeness of Freud whose large portrait hung on the wall behind his chair. Zimmermann told him it was taken while he was studying under him at the Allgemeines Krankenhause in Vienna. Even Zimmermann’s beard was styled like Freud’s. And his cigars . . . .

In the old tawny daguerreotype, Sam saw Freud’s inscription with Zimmermann’s name trailing off the edge of the portrait. None of them had seen Zimmermann for several years after Dora’s funeral, and Sam was surprised to see his white hair. He thought Zimmermann looked like the late Gregory Peck. His hair was a crown of ivory that lay softly matted and clung to his old head like a snow-white octopus clinging to a rock. He looked grotesque in his sagging gray three-piece suit when he suddenly stood, seemingly on stilts, leaning over his desk on his fingertips.

Never summon a ghost unless you are prepared to depart with it, he’d told me.

This ghost is beckoning, not being summoned, I told him.

There was a photograph of him and Jody May on his desk. He picked it up and scrutinized it. He said, ‘You just lost Dora; now, I am losing Jody.

He put the photo back down and looked at me rather oddly and said ‘Harry was a little . . . Zimmermann raised his hand and tapped his temple.

"I looked at the portrait of Freud on the wall behind his desk and wondered why so many books had been written expounding the derangements, aberrations, and malfunctions of the brain with such nomenclature as libido, Oedipus complex, mania, neurosis, psychosis, schizophrenia, etc., when it could all be said by such a simple expedient as the tapping