Celebrity by Thomas Thompson

Author:Thomas Thompson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
Published: 2016-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eighteen

There was and is a lovely cluster of harmonious buildings on a wooded green clump of land near Dallas. Outwardly, little betrays its purpose. The sign at the beginning of the used brick driveway, Silverlawn, could mark a great ranch or an artistic commune. Indeed, vegetables are grown and pictures are painted, but they are the labors of madmen who, in order to dwell at Silverlawn, must also be rich.

T. J. Luther discovered this on the spring morning in 1960 when he went to visit his bride. A psychiatrist name of, fittingly, Golden informed him that Melissa would require “a very long period of treatment” at Silverlawn, whose ministrations cost a basic fee of $1,000 a month. T.J. protested that such fees were beyond his apacities and should be paid by the Craymore family fortune. Whereupon Dr. Golden tapped a silver pen against his teeth and produced a lengthy letter from the firm of Ward, Megal and Schumac, attorneys-at-law: there was no Craymore estate. The mansion in Rivercrest was mortgaged beyond its worth with unpaid back taxes totaling $12,400. Its furnishings, including all of the stuffed animals, had been willed to the Fort Worth Zoological Society, which did not wish to claim them. The Olds 98 that Melissa drove was scarcely hers, six out of thirty-six payments having been made. Her jewels were paste. On the day that T.J. first encountered Melissa at the bank, she withdrew all but $230 in her only account. She was a trespasser in the land of money. And as there were no other living relatives, the husband of Mrs. Melissa Craymore Luther was expected by law to pay for her psychiatric bed, board, electric shock, and chloral hydrates.

T.J. wondered why Melissa had come to Silverlawn, seeing-as how she disappeared the night their honeymoon cottage burned. “Your wife has been with us here before. Oh my, yes,” answered Dr. Golden. Several times. Beginning at the age of twelve when she spent two months of summer vacation recuperating from what the psychiatrist euphemistically called “paternal abuse.” Again at fourteen when father Craymore threatened to shoot her in the breasts and mount her head on the living-room wall between the lioness and the giraffe he had purchased in Kenya. And once more following high school graduation and the simultaneous suicide of Daddy, whose will revealed that Missy was the illegitimate daughter of a New Orleans prostitute named Clothilde. It took eighteen months that time at Silverlawn for Missy to “assimilate” this cruel legacy, whereupon she was released and spent two cloistered years nursing her stroked-out mother.

Missy had not gone to Radcliffe, had not studied art, had not done much of anything except get crazy and uncrazy and entrap the Prince of Temptation as a husband.

“Would you like to see her?” asked Dr. Golden.

“I wouldn’t want to trouble her,” answered T.J.

“I think she would be very pleased,” said the psychiatrist, who escorted the thoroughly confused bridegroom to a cozy red brick cottage (it looked very similar to the one that Missy had ordered T.

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