Black Light (5 page)

But I was absolutely bone-lazy: loathed learning my lines, hated acting exercises, refused to breathe from the diaphragm. And I had such a bad sense of direction that blocking was a nightmare. I could never remember where upstage was. The lights blinded me. I stepped on people’s feet and forgot my lines, and had such horrible stage fright that I threw up before every performance. More than once Hillary had to literally push me onstage from the wings. Anywhere else on earth, I would have been banned from school productions, or sent for extensive counseling to determine why I insisted on acting in the first place.

Finally, to save face, I announced to my family and friends that I was going to be a playwright; and to this end began carrying around a notebook and a copy of
The Bald Soprano.
At night, alone in my room, I’d sit in front of an old Underwood typewriter, a filched bottle of vodka under my desk, and write. Actually, what I really did was drink, and listen to the radio through my headphones. But the line about being a playwright worked. People stopped pestering me to try out for plays. For a little while, at least, I felt as though I fit in.

Because this was Kamensic, and Kamensic
was
theater. What the village had, and has, is actors.
Real
actors, Broadway actors as well as Hollywood royalty, from Tallulah Bankhead and the Lunts, D. W. Griffith and DeVayne Smith, to lesser-known survivors like Theda Austin and the Wellers. Later there would be aging rock stars and hosts of twilight television (Cap’n Jack and Officer Hap and Gore DeVal), as well as retired icons from
King of the Hillbillies
and
Tales from the Bar Sinister.

This last was where my father made his living, as the eponymous watering hole’s cadaverous yet elegant bartender, Uncle Cosmo, affectionately known as Unk.
Tales from the Bar Sinister
was fabulously popular on network TV in the early 1970s and had a long and happy half-life in syndication. My father couldn’t go out for groceries without being recognized, and everyone from waiters at the Muscanth Restaurant to kids on 125th Street called him Unk. Years later, when the show was picked up by Nickelodeon, Unk became a genuine pop icon. Recalled fondly by his original fans, embraced by a new generation who loved his moldy tuxedo, his garish Cryptkeeper makeup, and Peter Lorre voice.
Our
magazine even ran a cover:
(H)UNK!
it read, beneath his kindly crepuscular face.

Back then, and like everyone else in Kamensic, I took it all for granted. My father with his horror-show garb, mother with her daytime Emmys and
TV Guide
Reader’s Choice Awards. In Kamensic, Unk was spoken of as respectfully as Hume Cronyn or Jason Robards. At the annual village Christmas party my mother’s reading of “A Christmas Memory” reduced everyone to tears.

“Your mother.” Hillary shook his head, staring at my mother’s slender figure perched on a stool at the front of the Town Hall, surrounded by banks of sweet-smelling pine boughs and clumps of ghostly white mistletoe. “In the old days they would’ve burned her at the stake.”

“Along with
your
mother.”

“Yeah.” Hillary slumped down into his seat. “Actually, they probably would’ve burned the whole fucking
town.
”

If Kamensic was a strange place to grow up, I never knew it. My mother worked outside the home before most women did, but then so did everyone else’s mom, acting or dancing or singing or designing costumes. I was lucky enough to be raised by my father rather than a housekeeper or nanny. Except for the three years when
Bar Sinister
was being shot in California, it was Unk who got up with me every morning, Unk who made my brown bag lunches and waited for me at the bus stop, Unk who met me each afternoon. My mother of course was in the city, taping
Perilous Lives.
My earliest memories are of waking at four
A.M.
, lying in bed, and hearing her pad softly about our rambling house as she gathered her makeup bags and fashion magazines, and the more purposeful sound of my father in the kitchen, making her breakfast. Smells of coffee and scrambled eggs floating up through the chilly dark house; then the huffing of our Volkswagen squareback as my father drove my mother to the station, so that she could catch the first train to the city and make a six-thirty call.

My mother’s married name was Audrina Moylan. As a girl in London she had played all the Shakespearean ingenues, Ophelia, Cordelia, Rosalind; but it was as Audrey Gold that she created the role she inhabited for forty-some years, that of Livia Prentiss on
Perilous Lives.
Livia was raven-haired and raven-hearted; a suburban Medea in Bob Mackie gowns who seduced, poisoned, throttled, baited, stalked, and reproached her television clan for sixty minutes a day five days a week. Livia’s children were numerous and quarrelsome as those dragon’s-teeth sown by Cadmus, and Livia herself was something of a hydra, impossible to kill, prone to ridiculously unbelievable recoveries: from cancer, coma, drowning, childbirth. The character of Livia was equally immortal, but my mother had shed her Shakespearean aspirations with as little thought as a snake sheds its skin. She reveled in Livia, collected her Emmys and displayed them proudly in the living room beside infant photographs of her only daughter and a silver-framed picture of my father and Axel Kern at the Oscar ceremonies, the year Kern won for directing
Die by Night.
My mother loved her daily treks to the city, thrived on them; and while she claimed to love Kamensic, she is the one person who always seemed immune to its disquieting charm.

I grew up in Kamensic; everyone I knew grew up in Kamensic. Our parents worked in the city, as actors or directors or designers or dancers; but I had seldom been to the city alone, without my parents. Our houses were very old—those fieldstone fortresses left by the Dutch patroons, a few colonial farms left unburned by Warrenton’s raid—or else they were aggressively new, futurist machines designed by Vuko Taskovich or Michael Graves, the approximate shape and color of battleships. My family lived in one of the colonials, set within a broad swathe of lawn in that part of town known as The Hamlet. This was where the Constance Charterbury Library was, and Schelling’s Market. On Sundays we had brunch with our parents’ agents at the Village Inn. When my father was rehearsing for the Avalon Shakespeare season, groceries were delivered via bicycle from Schelling’s. Every year at my birthday party, my father would make a surprise entrance as Unk, which would send my guests into gleeful fits and me into an absolute rigor of embarrassment.

Still, while having Uncle Cosmo as a parent was mortifying, a lot of my friends had it worse. Duncan Forrester’s father had remarried a famous feminist sculptor who filled their rose garden with enormous bronze castings of her vulva. Linette Davis’s mother, Aurora Dawn, had been a model and actress in the Warhol Factory who was famous now for drunk driving. Sport and Jacey Finn had six sons with golden hair and emerald eyes, all addicted to heroin. In a lot of ways Kamensic seemed like a throwback to medieval times, a walled fortress with a high child-mortality rate. There were not many children in Kamensic, certainly not as many as in the neighboring towns of Goldens Bridge and Mahopac and Pawkotan. Children were at once cherished and expendable; families were large, so that even if one or two of the older kids were lost to drugs or madness or the Ivy League, the younger ones could always be found hanging out in front of the library, or fidgeting in the back of the Congo Church during benefit performances of new works by Beckett or John Guare. The Vietnam War swept by us like an Angel of Death distracted by other things: there were enough Kamensic boys of age to fight, but somehow no one was ever drafted. Our parents were unilaterally against the war, the town was against the war; and that seemed to be enough to protect us.

We were all wild things there. Indulged or ignored by famous parents who traded psychiatrists, agents, drug dealers, spouses; shielded by the miles of wood and mountain that stood between us and the city to the south, the desultory suburbs all around. Kamensic itself stood guard against the darkness I sensed sometimes on a June day, the sun glaring off the surface of Lake Muscanth as though off a blue-lacquered plate, crimson dragonflies lighting upon my bare knees as Hillary and I lay naked in the summer warmth.

But still we knew something was there, waiting. Sometimes I imagined I could hear it—a sound that was just barely audible, an engine thrumming somewhere deep below the water like that faerie mill that grinds salt into the sea. Ali heard it, too, and she said she knew what it was—

“The dead bell.”

“The dead bell?” This was when we were thirteen or so, and Ali was reigning queen of slumber parties because of her repertoire of ghost stories and morbid lore. Ali was Alison Fox, my other best friend. She lived in a vast gray argosy of a house on the far side of Muscanth Mountain. Her parents were recently separated. At least I had both parents, even if there were times I longed to live somewhere else, Somers or Mahopac or Shrub Oak, with a father who worked for IBM and a mother who stayed home and played bridge on Thursday nights. It was a snow day and we were at my house, waiting for Hillary to join us so we could play Monopoly. “What the hell is
that?
”

“You know. Up
there
”— She cocked a thumb at the window. —“at Kern’s place. That bell in the gate. It rings when someone’s going to die.”

“So how come it didn’t ring last week when Mr. Lapp died?”

Ali cracked the window open and lit a cigarette, kneeling on the floor so the smoke would drift outside. “’Cause it’s not when just
anyone
dies. It’s like a banshee or something. It only rings for certain people.”

“Like who?” I was dubious. Ali was weirdly superstitious—she believed “I Am the Walrus” actually
meant
something, and had a bizarre theory linking Brian Jones’s death and the film version of
Rosemary’s Baby
—but she was also more plugged into local gossip than I was.

“Like Acherley Darnell. And all those people who killed themselves.”

“Acherley Darnell died two hundred years ago. That bell’s just for decoration or something.”

“Uh-uh. And you know what else—they killed someone every time they made one.”

“When who made
what?
”

“The people who made that bell, in England or wherever it came from. It was a custom. They would pour the melted bronze into a mold, and then they would take a person and
zzzzt
”— Ali mimed drawing a blade across her throat. —“they’d cut their neck and put the blood in with the metal. Because otherwise the bell would crack, and you’d never get the tone right.”

All this was actually starting to give me the creeps, but I didn’t want Ali to know that. I gave her a disgusted look. “What a bunch of crap.”

“It’s true. I mean, my father said Kern told him it was true,” she insisted. “Why would he make it up?”

“He makes all those movies. He makes
everything
up. That bell probably came from some Dumpster in Larchmont.”

“Hey.” Icy wind gusted into the room and there was Hillary, shaking snow from his hair as he tossed his ski jacket onto the floor. “How come the board’s not set up?”

“Cause Ali’s running her mouth again, that’s why.”

I pushed past Hillary, heading into the next room to get the Monopoly set. The truth was, I felt annoyed by Ali’s story. Not because it was another one of her crazy anecdotes, but because I’d never heard it before. Axel Kern was
my
godfather, after all:
I
was the one who’d spent childhood evenings at Bolerium listening to his tales and watching movies in his screening room with my father, while the wind roared through the broken windows Axel never bothered to fix, and voles nested in the velvet seat cushions.

In Kamensic you could never trade much on fame, your own or your family’s—everyone was either famous, or sort of famous, or had
been
famous. The exception was Axel Kern. Because Kern wasn’t just famous. He was notorious, perhaps even dangerous. Like Acherley Darnell, who had been found guilty of the murders of his own daughter and her lover and hanged in front of the village courthouse, his body left on the gallows overnight. The next morning it was found swinging from one of Bolerium’s parapets, throat cut and body bled as though he had been a hare.

Nothing like that had happened to Axel Kern—yet. My own childhood memories of him were complex and rather strange, shaded as much by my physical impressions as anything else. These were startlingly acute. I have a strange gift for recalling sensations, and my father sometimes joked that I was psychic, though my mother would not allow a Ouija board in the house, and when I received an Amazing Kreskin’s ESP game for my birthday one year, she made me give it away. So while I recognized Kern’s famous profile—the tilted, deep-set eyes and high cheekbones, the iron-streaked dark hair and tawny skin that added to his exotic, unsettling persona—what I recalled most about him was the acrid scent of his trademark black Sobranies and the taint of red wine on his breath, at once sweet and foul. Or the way his hands felt when he occasionally and absently stroked my cheeks. Kern was not overly affectionate, at least with children, though he was always kind to me. His hands were large and heavily lined, as his face would one day be; it always felt as though he were wearing leather gloves, supple and rather tough. Yet his clothes were extremely dandyish, even for that foppish age. Custom-made Carnaby Street suits of silk velvet the color of ormolu. Belgian lace shirts so fine I could see through them to his coppery skin and the thick curling hair of his chest. Embroidered Berber robes from Morocco; cowboy boots of ostrich and elephant and python and what Axel solemnly assured me was mastodon, from a corpse recently uncovered in Siberia. I recall all of these, and his voice, lilting for such a big man—Kern was well over six feet—though I remember little of what he actually said. Probably this was because he seldom spoke to me. As I said, he had scant use for children.

Still, I had always felt a proprietary claim on him. And Ali’s story about the bell, ridiculous as it was, pissed me off. Now I stomped around for several minutes, hearing her laughter from the next room and the wind battering the storm windows.