Doctor Sax (13 page)

“But he’s only a truck driver,” she’d say. “There’s nothing really
fine
about him.” She probably meant he was just dumb and silent, Shammy was, nothing much troubled him, he was a goodlooking peaceful man. Blanche wanted Rachmaninoff in her teacups.

“Oh the irony of life.”

“Yeah,” my mother’d echo, “the iyony of life, oui”—and bundle along with Blanche’s arm in hers in coats for the latenight mist, and I, Ti Jean, walking beside them sometimes
listening but most of the time watching the dark shadows in the night, from Sarah park to the Funerals and Grottos of Pawtucket, looking for The Shadow, for Doctor Sax, listening for the laugh, “mwee hee hee ha ha,” looking for that lawn where G.J. and I and Dicky Hampshire wrestled, the place where Vinny Bergerac and Lousy threw popcorn at each other etc. and also wrapped deep in that dream of childhood which has no bottom and instantly soars to impossible daydreams, I’ve got the whole city of Manhattan paralyzed, I’m going around with a super-buzzing-current in me that knocks everything out of its way and also I’m invisible and taking money out of cash registers and striding along 23rd Street with fire in my head and making the elevated highways ring with my electricity, on steel and stone etc.— Across the street, just before we go in the Grotto, is the store Uncle Mike briefly owned before he got too sick and for a while Edgar ran it and one summer night I heard him say that new word “sex appeal” and all the ladies laughed–

As we’re turning from the sidewalk into the darkness of the Grotto (it’s about eleven o’clock) Blanche is saying “If he only’d made some money somehow, if he’d been rich like some men do with store,—instead the squalor of those years and that house, really Angy I was born for something much grander, don’t you feel it in my music?”

“Blanche I always did say you was a very great painist —there!—a great artist, Blanche, I understand you, when you make a mistakes on the piano I always know, it’s always been so–ain’t it?”

“You do have a good ear, Ange,” conceded the Princess.

“You damn tootin right–ask anybody if I ain’t got a good ear, Ti Jean, I tell you,” (turning to me)
“a toutes les fois que Blanche fait seulement quainque un ti mistake sur son piano, pis je’ll sais tu-stiite, … Hah?”
(Repeating what she said.)

And I jump up athletically to catch a branch of the overhead tree in answer and to prove my world is more action —so engrossed have we been in our conversation, we’re in the Grotto!—deep, too,—halfway to the first Station of the Ghost. The first of the stations faced the side of a funeral home, so you kneeled there, at night, looking at faint representations of the Virgin, hood over head, her sad eyes, the action, the tortured wood and thorns of the Passion, and your reflections on the subject become mirrored from the funeral home where a dull light fixed in the ceiling of an overpass rain garage for hearses shines dully in the gravelly gloom, with bordering dewy grassplots and shrubs to give it the well-tended look, and the drapes in the windows showing, incredibly, where the funeral director himself lives, in his House of Death.
“This is our home”
Everything there was to remind of Death, and nothing in praise of hfe —except the roar of the humpbacked Merrimac passing over rocks in formations and arms of foam, at 11:15
P.M
. Among the shrubs of wild grotto and senary funeral home I know there in the green opulence of dollars and in the grotto sorrows of rocks and plaster … gravel croaked and on-led for persetury investigators in the wrong roil road to the flaminary immensities and up-fluge of the poor bedight-ed, be-knighted Crown and Clown of sorrowmary doom in This anyway-globe … the Jesus most admirable in his
height–in all this Doctor Sax I knew, I saw him watching from a shroud in the bushes by the river … I saw him flit across the moonlit rocks of the summerriver to come and see the visitors in the Grotto. I saw him flit from Station with his cape now hanging from the orphan home walls with a keen eye on our doings… I saw him flit from Station to Station, from the backs of em, in terrible blasphemy prayer in the dark with everything reversed–he was only following to see me, it was later when the Snake was ready and Sax brought me to see, which was the final thing that happened and I covered my eyes for fear of what I saw–

We made the stations to the ultimate foot of the Cross, where my mother kneeled, prayed, and worked a step up. the cross-mount, to show me how some people did it all the way up–to the foot of the Cross itself, tremendous ascents to blasphemous heights in the river breeze and views of long land vistas– We tramped back arm-in-arm down the gravel path running thru the grotto dark, to the lights of the street again, where we bade Blanche adieu.

I always liked to get out of there …

And headed towards home– There was a full moon that night.

(The following full moon, August month the next, I had my bus pass stolen from me as I stood with it clasped behind me in the glittering lights of Kearney Square and a sad bully of the Lowell alleys rushed up and stole it and ran through the crowd. “The full moon,” I cried, “twice in a row–it’s giving me–death, and now I get robbed, O Mama, God, what you,—hey,” and I rushed in the terrible clarity of the August full moon to hide myself from it …
as I ran home across the Moody Bridge the moon made the mad white horses foam all beautiful and close and shiny so that it was almost inviting–to jump in–everybody in Pawtucketville had the perfect opportunity to commit suicide coming home every night–that is why we lived deep lives—)

The full moon this night was the moon of death. We, my mother and I rounded the corner of Pawtucket and Moody (cattycorner across the home of the French Canadian St. Joseph’s parochial Jesuit brothers, my fifth-grade teachers, gloomy men in their black mid sleep now), and stepped on the planks of the Moody Street Bridge and headed over the canal which after a huge stonewall offered the rest of the waterbed dug in primord-rock to the river that dug it with its lovekiss tongues–

A man carrying a watermelon passed us, he wore a hat, a suit in the warm summer night; he was just on the boards of the bridge, refreshed, maybe from a long walk up slummy swilly Moody and its rantankling saloons with the swinging doors, mopped his brow, or came up through Little Canada or Cheever or Aiken, rewarded by the bridge of eve and sighs of stone–the great massive charge of the ever stationary ever yearning cataracts and ghosts, this is his reward after a long dull hot dumb walk to the river thru houses–he strides on across the bridge– We stroll on behind him talking about the mysteries of life (inspired we were by moon and river), I remember I was so happy-something in the alchemy of summernight, Ah Midsummer Night’s Dream, John a Dreams, the clink of clock on rock in river, roar–old gloor-merrimac figalitating down the
dark mark all spread–I was happy too in the intensity of something we were talking about, something that was giving me joy.

Suddenly the man fell, we heard the great thump of his watermelon on wood planks and saw him fallen– Another man was there, also mysterious, but without watermelon, who bent to him quickly and solicitously as by assent and nod in the heavens and when I got there I saw the watermelon man staring at the waves below with shining eyes
(“IFS meurt,
he’s dying,” my mother’s saying) and I see him breathing hard, feeble-bodied, the man holding him gravely watching him die, I’m completely terrified and yet I feel the profound pull and turn to see what he is staring at so deadly-earnest with his froth stiffness–I look down with him and there is the moon on shiny froth and rocks, there is the long eternity we have been seeking.

“Is he dead?” I said to my mother. As in a dream we adjourn behind the dead man, who sits near the rail with his stare, holding his belly with his wrist, all slumped, distant, in the throes of that which is carrying him far away from us, something private. Another man vouchsafed an opinion:

“I’ll get an ambulance at St. Joseph’s here, he may be alright.”

But my mother shook her head and made that sneer you see the world wide around, in California or in China, “No,
s’t’homme la est fini
(no, that man there is finished) “—
“Regard–Teau sur les planches, quand quun homme smeurt its pis dans son butain, toute part
… (Look, the
water on the planks, when a man dies he pees in his clothes, everything goes.)”

Indubitable proof of his death I saw in that tragic stain that in the moonlight was specialized milk, he was not going to be abight at all, he was already dead, my mother’s was no prophecy it was a known thing from the start, her secret snaky knowledge about death as uncanny as the Fellaheen dog that howls in the muddy alleys of Mazatlan when death has laid its shroud on the dead in the dark. I had intended to look at the dead man again–but now I saw he was really dead and taken–his eyes had turned glassy on the milky waters of the night in their hollow roar cold rock–but it was
that
part of the giant rocks below he chose to die his fixed gaze on–that part which yet I see in dreams of Lowell and the Bridge. I shuddered and saw white flowers and grew cold.

The full moon horrified me with her cloudy leer.
“Regard, la face de skalette dans la Inner
cries my mother–
“Look, the face of a skeleton in the moon!”

THUMPING TREES IN THE WELD WOOD
beyond the bridge rail, the forests of the rock bank of Merrimac, where oft I’d seen old Sax–heart urge his oiky-cloiky fly along the black sides, headed for a perfidy of dirt–in mists of raw March-wild glee–

The history of the Castle goes back to the 18th century
when it was built by a mad seafarer named Phloggett who came to Lowell looking for a sea-like expanse of the Merrimac and decided on the Rosemont basin and built his old haunted rockheap on the top of the Centralville hill where it backsloped to its Pelhams and Dracuts (many’s the time we’d run around there Joe and me picking green apples from the ground by stone walls and finding rusty fenders to piss on in the heart of every forest)—a ruinous old bones of a house, with turrets, stone, entryways gothicized, a gravel driveway which was put in by its 1920’s occupants for roadsters of the Ripe–Old Epzebiah Phloggett, he was a seafarer, for all we know he was a slavetrader — He sailed from Lynn in the molasses and rum fleet-Retired he went to his Lowell castle–not known as Lowell then, and wild–nothing but the Pawtucket Indians sending up their calm wigwams at eve with a puff of smoke-Old Smogette Phloggett occasionally made hikes with his footmen to see the Indians, at the Falls–where the river left its shale shelf that has served it since before Nashua and now drops blonk into the wornaway rock–rock as soft as silk when you touch it in hot dry summers– Phloggett didn’t have much to do with the Indians, he occasionally bought a young squaw and brought her to the Castle and back again in a week– There was something evil in the bottom of his dirty old soul … some snaky secret Sax knew about later– He had a long old antiquarian telescope eye-glass that he unfurled on gray March mornings on the West balcony and pointed to the wild wide Merrimac as it ancestral plowed its original forest-trail thru the site of Now-Lowell–not a house–New England was alone in the
woods of time. Where Dracut Tigers field now is, back of homeplate, in the shrubs and stub pines, a red man Indian stalked in the silent mom–the birds that luted in the dew, and pointed rosy eyes to the new Promised East, are now the birds that fritter on the branch of dust–ancestral voices in the mute mist of morning, without fanfare or cry, quiet, it was bound to be there a long time– Phloggett trains his telescope on these woods, on the hump-rise of the sandbank in its wild golden isle mid green,—the huge tree across the street from my Sarah Avenue house stood then with the same majesty and height above the solid grunchy vastness green of the Pawtucketville forest–no dream-skyscrapers sprung from Mt. Vernon Street-George Washington was a boy stalking deer in Virginia flat forests– In the Gaspé peninsula up north the first of the American Armorican Duluozes was wrangling with his squaw on the Wolf River morns–over by Pine Brook, in the 18th century, peaceful, tepees were pitched in the sward carpet of the spring, over the pine hill the crows cawed, a hunter came tramping home over the field–a young Indian boy dove brown and naked with his tuft-hair and red-stone bracelet into the cool pool of life–it was centuries later I came by there with Sebastian and Dicky Hampshire and we sang poems to the rising sun–African alligator adventures took place along Pine Brook (Slow Waters) clear to the Rosemont (Ohio River at its Cairo) junction with (Swift Waters) Merrimac in the drowsy afternoons of Indian children– Fellaheen singers with greasy manes and capes made mournful Hebraic cries along the
merced
walls of Cadiz, in the 18th century morn– The whole world,
fresh and dewy, rolled to the sun–as it will tomorrow morning so golden-

Old Epzebiah Phloggett the owner of Phlogget Hill Castle–Snake Hill Castle it eventually became, because of the overabundance of small snakes and garter snakes to be found on that hill–little Tom Sawyers of early Lowell pre Civil War went angling up that hill from the old Colonial slums of Prince Street or Worthen where Whistler was born, found the snakes, renamed the hill– Phloggett died in solitude and black loneliness in the primordial castle … some ghastly thing was buried with him. It was years later the cool lake of the basin was rippled by the oars of the Thoreau brothers, and Henry himself up-glanced the Castle with a snort so profound with contempt he never wrote it–besides, his eye was in the water lily, his hand was on the Upanishads–

For a very real snaky reason the unnamably evil owner of the Castle died–of snakebite. Buried no one knew where —derelict castle gooked alone.

Phloggett had sold Black Ivory to the Kings.

In the 19th century it was bought from some firm in Lynn by a landed family from Lynn, contemptuous of the manufacturing gentry but forced to face the early mills across the water; it became their summer place. Oil paintings were hung on the walls, in niches, family portraits, the fireplace roared, the genteel sons stared at the Merrimac with after dinner sherries–from the sun-red west balcony in March dusks, and were bored. Post chaises couldn’t make it to the Castle, bad road–so finally the family got bored–and then the sicknesses began, they all died of
something or other. It began to be realized the Castle was never meant for human occupation, it had a hex. The family (Reeves of Lynn) (they’d renamed it Reeves Castle) packed and got out, depleted–the mother, a daughter and three sons dead, one an infant–all of them had been on a summer at the Lowell Castle–the father and his remnant son went to Lynn, got moldered with Hawthorne’s bones nearabouts–