Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

CHAPTER 1

The bus-driver was whistling, perhaps in anticipation of his wife, who would be a woman with ample breasts, those of a realized maturity. It would be impossible that he did not have, from my point of view, a wife and children, indeed, a happiness such as I could not imagine to be real, even like some legend out of the golden ages. He had spoken numerous times during our journey of his old woman waiting, and he was going home.

As if he were a Jehovah’s Witness or a member of some other peculiar religious sect, his bushy hair grew almost to his shoulders. A Witness would not perhaps drive a Grey Goose bus, even in this far country, this interior America, but his head was large, bulging, an old, archaic dome of curled sculpture, and his eyes shone with gleamings of intensified, personal vision. He drove, in fact, erratically, perhaps because of the heavy mist which all but blotted out the asphalt road, the limitation, and more than once, with the bus’s sudden lurching, I had feared that we might veer off into a ditch, that himself and his three passengers would be killed, our dismembered heads rolling in a corn field of withered corn stalks. He had whistled with each new escape, had turned and smiled back over his shoulder with a kind of serene triumph, even when the bus had brushed against the sides of a lumbering moving van with furniture piled up almost to the low sky, an upright piano, a rocking chair, a clothes’ horse, a woman’s feathered hat bobbing at the top in the grey mist like some accompanying bird.

Was he, after all, a bachelor, perhaps even some mad Don Quixote chasing windmills, a virgin spirit, nobody—and his family life, an emanation of my over-active imagination, really, my desire for established human relationships? All along the way, he had been drinking from a whiskey bottle, quite openly, yet with many calls upon God, the angels, the archangels, angel Gabriel. All along the way, he had been singing, whistling, talking to himself, guessing what the old woman would say when she saw him, that she would certainly take his head off.

There were a sleeping couple, a pair of lovers, boy and girl, the only other passengers. They had gotten on at a dust-colored pottery town in the burning sunlight and, shading their eyes, had tried to sleep through langorous, creaking miles of a too familiar landscape.

The girl, thin and faded, perhaps prematurely old, was pregnant—yet resisted, as if it were a deformity, her situation of growth, there being nothing langorous in her appearance, nothing which should give itself up to nature. Her tiny face was covered with an artificial complexion like a mask too heavy, streaked with grey, and her colorless eyes had the cold and transparent look of being not satisfied, of being not filled with the light which comes from love. She was obviously dressed in what must have been her most wonderful finery, though her ensemble was an accidental confusion, a chaos to the eyes of the bewildered beholder, she being too tightly laced and that protuberance under her heart standing out as if it were a disease she wished to cover over with all these discursive details which should not focus attention, yet drew attention to her. There were rings on her fingers, cheap cameos of an enormous size and pieces of colored glass, many brass and wooden bracelets on her arms, a gold chain with a heart on her gauze-shrouded ankle, straw flowers piled upon the snub toes of her velvet slippers spiked with glass heels which should not carry her far, velvet butterflies like pansies hovering upon the moth-eaten fox fur collar of her green cloth coat which would not close and was too tight and did not cover her, coming only to her hips, and was of an old-fashioned style with pointed sleeves and pointed cuffs and scalloped edges and many velvet-covered buttons or marks where the buttons had been, small, tinkling bells moving when, in her sleep, she moved from side to side, yet not yielding to the powers of sleep which she resisted as if they were the powers of oblivion and of death, and cascades of oblong ten cent store pearls were dripping from her coral-colored ears, and her eyelids were painted with blue shadows, her eyebrows plucked to an invisible line, giving to her the look of a plucked and naked bird, and her lips were enlarged to an angular squareness by the purple lipstick she might have put on in a rigorous dream. She wore, among all her heavy rings, no wedding ring, and her hands were pale yellow taloned by long red nails, her fingers continually scratching the worn surface of an old-fashioned patent leather vanity case she carried in her lap. Her dress of sleazy silk was bright burned orange painted with black sail-boats sailing over purple trees and red football players playing over steeples and white skiers skiing over sail-boats cascading to the hem and locked acrobats, the entire field of outdoor sports, it seemed, being on her body, for her scarf was painted with spidery tennis players and tennis nets and ice-skaters skating on silver ponds and red polo riders riding red horses, and there were little footballs hanging from her charm bracelets, tennis rackets and ice-skates and golf clubs and numerous other trophies, some of field and stream, satin fishes running around the hem of her chiffon petticoat edged with yellow lace, butterflies embroidered upon the knees of her thin silk stockings, and her skirts came up high above her knees, higher when she moved, showing her yellow satin garters and pairs of stuffed red valentine hearts dangling from ribbons and fares which were painted powder puffs, and the coat seemed shrunken or a size too small like something she might have worn in a remote youth. Her head was big on a narrow stem, her bleached yellow hair spirally built upward to a skein crowned with a spangled net and a hat which was a woven nest of dark and dusty funeral blossoms and ivory twigs with a pink enameled branch on which was perched, precariously at that high altitude in the cold air current, one stuffed yellow canary with a moth-eaten wing, a glassy eye.

Her stiff hand jogged in the aisle, a transparency through which one saw the knotted veins. She slept, narrow and turreted head stiff, upright, her eyes suddenly opening, seeming like insect eyes of many-faceted but cruel vision, her avid mouth in that small face opening to complain, with sudden rushes of metallic speech or with wild and hollow whispers, against her neighbors, against her mother, her father, the other girl, the way she had been caught, the growth of another life inside of her, this dark valley from which she might never return.

The boy seemed, by contrast, all blissful stolidity and broad-faced innocence, his chestnut-colored hair tousled like a pony’s on his low forehead, his skin burned to a dark, brick-colored red as by some immensely blowing heat not of the sunlight. He wore a faded football sweater, the letter C across its front, red-stained, rain-washed dungarees, moccasins embroidered with white beads. Sleeping the miles away, his cheek against the cold bus-window, his long-lashed eyelids closed, never opened, his lips placidly smiling.

Now as the bus-driver whistled, imitating the calls of birds to their mates, the bluebird’s trill, the woodpecker’s pecking, the murmur of quail, a baby’s cry he had heard in the winter grass, the bright redness of the sky’s reflection on the glazed bus-window was disappearing, and with that redness, the distinct, dismal lurching of old Coca-Cola and aspirin signboards, tattered as tramps, which had accompanied our journey to the depths of southern Indiana, a state as yet unknown to me. The sky was drained and bloodless above the darkness of ethereal fields as if it had suffered, in one slow moment, the ultimate transfusion, as if the veins were shriveled to nothingness. There was hardly a drop of red where lately the red had swarmed and buzzed like thousands of wild honey bees. It was spring, but it might have been winter still, another planet, the face of the dead moon. The earth was bare and cold and the thorn trees without flower. The bus-windows had turned to a cold, steaming greyness as if only the ghost of the world were crying outside, as if the known world of familiar associations had disappeared, and that which remained must seem but the conspiracy of memories and dreams floating without purpose, without limitation.

We had passed, on this journey, many curious pieces of rural architecture, an enormous coffee urn with its lid opened against the sky, a wigwam nightclub where, under a denuded oak, a melancholy buffalo was tethered, incongruous as the faded washing on the line. We had passed a windmill, a leaning tower, Noah’s Ark, the old woman who lived in the shoe, but these were miles back, and there were now no buildings but those of the amorphous distance, little, low-roofed houses, small as ruined birds’ nests, a child’s face at some near window, the individuality blotted out by the watery greyness of the Middle West, the train as small as a toy train crossing a toy bridge.

There was an endless greyness engulfing the bus which moaned, the road before us no longer seeming to bisect space, the low, shaven fields, both low and whitish, the cattle humps of vague, distant, treeless, mole-colored hills. The scene was increasingly enlarged like that which might have been the first creation when only the spirit of God had moved upon the deep. It was the face of the ambiguous waters, of no boundary line, no shore. The scene, in fact, to one who was accustomed to a great body of water, was oceanic, dotted by pale pools in the vapors of mist, and I should not have been surprised to see, drifting over these empty, unmarked meadows of the first creation, something of the last, a cloud of pearl-breasted seagulls, all crying with angelic voices, or moored at some far, receding horizon, a lost ship which would never reach port. We had passed, far back on the road, the last harbor, a lighthouse, a shipwreck. Frozen lights appeared now like flares of crystal warning in the mist-shrouded, dark plain as if all the houses from which they emitted were travelling with us into an unknown distance from which no man returns alive. Far away, like smoke, there were plumed trees drifting, bent by the actions of no winds, and no stars were visible. In the beam of our anarchic head lights which barely cut through mist and darkness, there stood, by the side of the road, a tall man with a child perched on his lean shoulders, a double-headed man, staring at nothingness or beyond it. We were the intruders upon this plain of silence, and he shook his fist, listlessly, perhaps figuring the danger of walking on this road which now, suddenly turning, seemed to go back the way it had gone before. There was now no landscape.

There was now no landscape but the soul’s, and that is the inexactitude, the ever shifting and the distant. I would never know the man’s name, the organization of this fleeting image, what were his hopes, what were his disappointments. Yet he would remain forever engraved on memory’s whirling disc, that double-headed shape in curdled mist, as tantalizing as my ignorance of life. All my life I had been reaching for the tangible, and it had evaded me, much like the myth of Tantalus, much as if the tangible itself were an illusion. My life had been made up of just these disrelated, delusive images hovering only for a moment at the margin of consciousness, then passing like ships in the night, even ships manned by dead helmsmen, by ghostly crews, by one’s own soul at large.

What was the organization of illusion, of memory? Who knew even his own divided heart? Who knew all hearts as his own? Among beings strange to each other, those divided by the long roarings of time, of space, those who have never met or, when they meet, have not recognized as their own the other heart and that heart’s weaknesses, have turned stonily away, would there not be, in the vision of some omniscient eye, a web of spidery logic establishing the most secret relationships, deep calling to deep, illuminations of the eternal darkness, recognitions in the night world of voyager dreams, all barriers dissolving, all souls as one and united? Every heart is the other heart. Every soul is the other soul. Every face is the other face. The individual is the one illusion.

I had walked alone, searching, seeing only, though I sought for an ultimate harmony, the fleeting image, the disrelation, the chaos begetting the chaos, the truth as but another illusion, that which must perish, the rose which must fade, the heart which must stop. Nothing I had touched but that it had faded like a dream, there being no dream that would not fail, no life which would not cease, no soul which answered mine like deep calling to deep. I had walked alone, the seeker through mazes of sorrow, and none had answered me. That background of illusion from which I always fled like a drowning man who clutches at a straw, it was always that background of illusion confronting me again, even as the foreground, and there seemed no truth but what the erroneous mind provided, another dream which had nor purpose nor bearing. There were always the dead seagulls in the whirlwind, the brown leaves falling, an empty, resonant house of broken mirrors reflecting the light of the sea, my mother dead among her dreams, many others dead with her who had dreamed her life away and who still might be dreaming, for death might still be her life, and she had been already so much a part of the ethereal and of the abstract, of the things intangible, of the things unknown. I had peered into all faces, seeing none, only those who were already gone, only those who could not answer. My illness had been great, dead souls like the autumn leaves stirring where I walked, and could I have believed in that ultimate harmony, I could have been among them, but there had been only, in my narrow experience, the dream of chaos repeating chaos, so what I looked for always in the streets of those great harbor cities, was it not merely another illusion, that of the peace which should not be realized in heaven or on earth? Where should I go? Where should I turn? I had been too long half sleeping, cut off from communication with others, asking no more reasonable questions than a patient asks under the ether mask which seems like a train riding among the trackless stars or where there are no stars, no signposts any longer, and no one has ever seen the other person. All the other passengers, Negroes with white roosters crowing in their laps, beings unseen, merely sensed, each with his own dark and private heart, the darkness everlasting, their questions like my own, and no answer heard, for God is the loneliest of all, and there is perhaps no God but what we dreamed, and there is no train.

Long nights, searching for one who was dead, I, Vera Cartwheel, I, the imploring daughter of a mother under the sway of opium, a mother more beautiful than angels of light, I, Vera Cartwheel, had wandered through the streets of great, mysterious harbor cities, those which, at night, seemed all like each other, there where were the spectral faces appearing like foam, disappearing, faces as lost as mine, voices crying under water, seaweed locked in the hair of the drowned swimmer. I had slept in shelters for lost souls, those no one should miss, searching for one who was lost, forever outside, alone, the one person not dreaming and yet who had seemed, with the passage of years since her disappearance from my life, the central heart, the heart of all hearts, the face of all faces, the dead steersman, Miss MacIntosh, my darling, an old, red-headed nursemaid with her face uplifted toward the watery sky. I had walked through the desolate waterfront streets of those dark and intricate harbor cities, the neighborhoods of warehouses casting their shadows, shelters for old sailors, for lost souls, darkened lighthouses, had turned down the unlighted alleys where the starved cats prowl among refuse, gleaming fish, the drunken mariner lurches, the prostitute screams, had looked into every muffled doorway, under every dimmed, leering lamp, had searched for her among faceless old beggar women huddled in empty parks, the ragged men who sleep on fly-specked sidewalks, their mouths foaming with homeless dreams, had searched for her in old-fashioned saloons and bowling alleys and billiard parlors and under the falling leaves, had walked in whirling crowds that I might find her, had stopped at all corners where street preachers preached of the golden tides of the future world and harvests of dragons’ teeth and reaping the whirlwind, had gone to baseball games in those packed stadiums, watching the pitchers pitch the moons, the suns, the stars, had visited a planetarium and an aquarium and a museum, had drifted with no purpose but this, had followed everywhere, searching for her, one so clear, thinking that, some day, just when I lost my way in the absolute darkness or crossed a traffic-roaring avenue of obliterating head lights, screeching whistles, screaming stars, I should surely find her, Miss MacIntosh, my darling, only a step beyond, her whaler’s hat dripping with water, her plaid, faded waterproof flapping in the wind, her bent black umbrella uplifted like some enormous, dark, scudding bird against the clouded sky, the always overcast.

Long years, drifting without other purpose, I had searched for that hale companion of my lost childhood, no one but a fusty, busty old nursemaid, very simple-minded, very simple, the salt of common sense, her red hair gleaming to show that quick temper she always had, that impatience with which she would dismiss all shades and phantoms, even herself should she become one, for self-pity was not her meat, not her drink. Long years, my heart a dry, imploring emptiness, my eyes fixed on that one steady purpose, I had drifted from employment to employment, from hotel to hotel, searching relentlessly and everywhere for that old, plain darling who was lost, she who had cherished no illusions of noble grandeur, she who had rejected an aura, a crown of gold, she whose daily life had been unpresuming and hard, one not beloved then so much as now in memory, the dead steersman, her whaler’s hat dripping with water, her boundless face concealed by fog and wind, her heart the weakness of all hearts, the strength. Where should I not find her again? Where should I ever find her? The years of her death had added to her stature, making her seem almost vague.

That she had only disappeared, I had always said, for hers had been the face of every face, the heart of every heart, and she had been the truest person ever I had seen, no one but a poor old nursemaid walking along the seashore, taking her constitutional, the salt crystals bearding her cheeks and her pointed chin, nothing amazing her, no phantom accompanying her in her morning or evening walks. She had no prince charming, and she was a spinster, married not even to the dream. We were always alone. We would sit under the storm lamp in the evening, an old nursemaid and a child playing at dominoes, two sentient beings alone in that great house of shades and monsters, my mother’s citadel of dreams and visions and imaginary pretenders to vanished thrones, there where my mother dreamed, when the sea blew high, that fifty wild white horses had been struck dead by lightning in a ruined garden or that persons long drowned had walked out of the sea, their locks dripping. There was no one, however, and nothing had happened, Miss MacIntosh used to say, her knitting needles of ivory bone clicking like her false teeth, that no one must dream of what was not, of what would never be, that surely when I grew up, I must leave this realm of shades, this old New England house with its privileges of the past, those things which had been inherited, those which had been stolen from the dead. That I must strike out on my own, that I must lead a useful life and see America first, the broad interior, the spacious Middle West, that life which required no medium of the evil imagination to stand between one’s self and the clear reality of simple things, for reality was very good and could be found by those who lived, could be seen even with the naked eye. Common sense is the finest sense, she had always said, that the soul should not dream of those things far distant and not to be realized, for the way was very plain, quite direct. It was a granite road and not the sea road taken by the ships falling beyond a far horizon. But when no longer under the dimmed storm lamp in the long evenings we played at dominoes or Chinese puzzles, Miss MacIntosh and I, two living beings alone in that great, enchanted house which knew no time, when I was left alone, screaming and wild, then I had dreamed of her, my red-cheeked darling, for there had been no one else so true, so good, and, even in her unkindness, so kind.

Who now would recognize that background of illusion from which I had fled, so many years ago, seeking for her in all those places where she was not, where she might never be—that background from which I still was fleeing? After her disappearance or death, the sudden, terrible shock of that great loss which had divided my heart against my heart, there had been no one to turn to, no other sentient being of stable consciousness, and my mother, believing herself dead, that she had died long ago, had tried to kill me in order that I should be free of the influence of reality, had offered to me that poisonous compromise, my death pulsing rosily in the midst of my life, the world of dreams which would kill the dreamer and leave only the dream, the memories floating without purpose. Long ago, however, and by great effort, I had escaped my mother’s darkened and secluded house that I might find the life which needed no dream of death, that life Miss MacIntosh had spoken of in no uncertain terms, and I had wandered from darkened harbor to darkened harbor and from employment to employment, always with one clear purpose in mind, the search for a lost companion who was, for all I knew, already dead, swept up upon the other shore. I had lived in ducal suites, in tenements like rabbit warrens—wearing my rags, had slept in fine hotels in the beds of dead emperors and false princes and banished dukes—wearing my regal jewels and ermine cape and long white gown, had slept in the beds of the poor, even where the subway roared, for I had been indifferent to my environment, and I had not always remembered where I was, and I had known no one. I had drifted from place to place, holding such little jobs as I could concentrate on and yet continue my dreams, beginning to study architecture, then giving it up because I could not plan a house if there was one soul which could not live in it, and finally, having tried all else, had been a poor fumbling typist in an insurance agency, typing mortality rates through a blur of tears, the frequency or numbers of deaths in ratio to population, age, sex, color, employment, position in life.

No longer searching for her, the dead steersman, no longer dreaming, I was following now, at last, her advice, for I had come to this far place. No longer, by some momentary quiver of the dreaming eyelid, should I find reality itself the banished, that surface phantoms had displaced it, that the world had fled, that this was only its ghost blowing at the bus-window.

What motive in this quest but the search for life, for love, for truth that does not fail? I had come because of my own heart’s need for an answer. I had come because of the searchings of other souls, the dead, the lost, because of a chance remark overheard on the city streets, because of the encompassing darkness, because of my mind which had been filled with nothing but the imaginary speakers, the endless dialogues of self with self, because I must find my way from the darkness to the ultimate light. I had come because of a dead girl’s love letters scattered on the floor of her empty bedroom, the palm leaves crossed above the marble mantel piece, her rosary hanging on a brass bedpost, because of her suicide, because of a deaf musician, because of a drunkard’s celestial dream of childhood, because of the answers not heard, because of a blind man’s groping for his coffee cup at an all-night quick-lunch stand on the fog-shrouded waterfront of that great harbor city as he had asked of his companion—When shall the light, Peter, enter my soul? His eyes had been withered in their sockets—the bare light bulb glaring only three livid inches away from those burned-out hollows as he had groped for a thick white coffee cup, asking his plaintive, remorseless question—When shall the light, Peter, enter my soul again? Should he never again be as he had been in the old days, the world’s greatest juggler, performing for the Lord’s sake and glory, keeping six coffee cups mid-air simultaneously as he skipped a rope or rode on a bicycle, a sleight-of-hand artist who could pluck the playing cards off any man’s sleeve, produce a rabbit out of any man’s hat, make the invisible world visible as if an angel should be revealed?

Now as the bus groaned, each mile more laggard, the world stretching out to an unseen horizon, the world flat, I heard once more his question like my own—when shall the light enter my soul—and when should the deprivation cease, and when should the body be restored, and when should the heart beat again? Travel-stained, my cheek against the cold bus-window, my head roaring with the memory of space, how should I ever know the land I passed through, the deep calling to the deep, the answer, for I was cut off, alone, seeing the fleeting image, the fragment beyond realization, the memory? I had come by many means of passage, by train and plane, by evening comet plane, that from where one could see the earth’s abstract curvature in space, the dark mantle, the snowy dome lighted by starlight, no human faces, by the morning star from where one saw the dreaming roof-tops, by day train which had jogged among steep hills of slag and burning eyes and coal mining villages of bare-ribbed skeleton houses with their doors opened to the wind, the dust-colored rain, people blackened by coal dust, sweat, and sorrow, those who had gone down into the womb of mother earth, and now by this erratic bus which, plowing nowhere, suggested no landscape but the clouds, flight of angels drifting past the misted windows, no goal but something outside of time, some world more true than any that had been known, the beauty which would not be an aspect of the lie, the flesh and blood as organized, as complete, the hair, the lips, the eyes, the body organized, the human heart still beating.

And my search for this life was because of one already dead, she who had passed beyond, she who had been the moral guide, the unswerving, the true, her heart as stout as hickory or oak, her mind so sensible that she could not be deceived by any illusion or enchantment, she who was forever alone, outside, not taken in by all the sycophant luxuries of that opium paradise, a poor servant with patches on her best black cotton gloves, a fishnet reticule and rimless eye-glasses and no make-up, not even a touch of lip rouge, her face its natural color, her old black canvas umbrella lifted against the rain or sunlight as she had used to walk along the seashore, preferring that marginal estate to my mother’s house where, though the roarings of the surf like the roarings of lions should fill it, the sea itself was but another dream and far away as if it were intangible. The great, sea-blackened house with golden spires and cornices and towers peeled by the salt air, dark allées, hidden interiors, the empty drawing rooms where the hostess had not set foot for many years, as many drawing rooms as tideless years, the rooms too many for mortal use, chambers within chambers, the gilded, mirroring ballrooms where no one danced, the hangings of scaly gold and rain-stained velvet, the heathen monsters everywhere, the painted, clouded ceilings illuminated by partial apparitions of the gods, the silken, padded walls, the ropes of rusted bells, the angels and the cherubim and the immortal rose, the dream of heaven, the lily-breasted virgins sporting in fields of asphodel, the water-gurgling gargoyles or those coated by dust, the interior and exterior fountains, the broken marble statues in ruined gardens sloping towards the sea, the disc throwers, the fat cupids, the thin psyches with flowing curls, the mute Apollo Belvedere, the king’s horsemen, the life-sized chessmen seeming to move against the moving clouds that moved above the moving waters, the sea light lighting their wooden eyes, the seagulls perched like drifts of snow upon their heads.

What could Miss MacIntosh, a simple woman with a broken nose, find to admire in any broken marble statue, that which had been sculptured by man dreaming that he was other than he was or that he was man? Her religion was truth to nature, nothing else, as she would always say with a severity of good humor inviting no argument, no sad or meandering response. She disapproved quite heartily and firmly of all these unholy influences, these self-aggrandizements at the expense of common life which was the merest flesh and blood, her whole sensorium being repelled by the very dream of imagination which rejects reality, which flees from its bare face, for was she not sensible, the last person who would ever be taken in by what existed nowhere but in the dreaming mind, a plain, old-fashioned nursemaid, a red headed and practical Middle Westerner, stoutly girded by her whale-boned corset, plainly clothed, visible to all, one who had kept her head above the waters in Chicago and elsewhere, one who had rejected an aura which should distinguish her from others, one who, with her way clearly set and her heart not foolish, would submit to no luxurious temptation of this old crazy house on a desolate stretch of the primitive New England coast, there where, though all the ghosts of the universe wandered, shrieking like winds, like tides, like daft sea birds, she had seen nothing but what was plain, the desolation which was enough for her?

CHAPTER 2

My mother was oblivious to the realities of flesh and blood, those creatures of chance, apparently even to Miss MacIntosh, loud-mouthed though she was, unimaginative, no possible rival in the world of invisible dreams, the prosaic, fusty, busty old nursemaid with reddening cheeks, her red, marcelled hair gleaming like the sand streaked with sunset when the sandpipers wade in the glassy surf as the last light fades, her footsteps always certain, the last person who would ever disappear, the moral guide to the pale, rejected child whose eyes had not craved reality. My mother trusted no one, nor was she ever to be surprised, it seemed, by unusual transformations or transports, shiftings of form, by anything that might ever transpire, by anything protean, for the opium dreams surrounding her had provided no pillars of strength, no rose which did not eventually fade, no voice which did not fail. She presumed always that things were not what they seemed, that all forms must change their shapes, that all characters must bear, even to those most familiar with them, an element of cold surprise, even of horror, that her life was this play of illusion, that there should be nothing certain but uncertainty, no pavement more secure than the glassy surface of the evening tide and the far wash of waves. All her days were her nights, and all her nights were her days, and there was an eternal twilight, an obfuscation of faces, a crucial bewilderment. If servants were known as she was known, would not their lives appear more monstrous than hers and terribly extra-human? So she would ask, talking half in her enchanted sleep, often when there was no one present but the dream of who was not.

Heavily laden with jewels as a Greek corpse, my mother, she who had retired from the brutal world, whose eyes were shielded against the vulgar sunlight, slept for tideless years which were her vast excitement, surrounding herself with a world of dreams, visions, phantoms, her bedroom as filled with visitors as the Grand Central Station, some from the shores of Hades, voices of the dead, faded movie stars of the silent flicker films, imaginary telephone operators plugging in at imaginary switchboards, spirits like long-nosed bird dogs, drowned pearl-divers, old kings, old queens, figures older than Oedipus or Troy, New England spinsters with faces checkered like chessboards, jockeys riding the skeletons of dead horses, angelic birds. Her sleep was a form of watchful, wide-eyed wakefulness. Her wakefulness was a form of sleep. Nothing would have amazed her so much as nothing, the complete deprivation, the absence of being, for that was something, too, and always present in her eyes, as familiar to her as human frailty. She hovered for years between life and suspended death, enjoying both, her eyes refulgently shining, her eyes opened at times when she profoundly slept, one cheek always toward the shadow, her dark hair arranged in such a way that this cheek was always concealed. It was because of this shadowed cheek that she had gone to bed in the first place, so many years ago, because of a blemish, a stain, a birthmark which was invisible to others and which, besides, was always covered with fine white rice powder, shadowed even then, she standing in only that position where, when her guests came, or even when they were absent, the shadow fell. Now she was always apparently in the bloom of some strange extension of health, though she was yet the eternal invalid, the horizontal person, one whose heart, as she believed, was not centralized but scattered through every nerve cell, shining like sourceless starlight. Lying still in a sumptuous bed carved with faceless dolphins and cherubim and kingly faces and heraldic devices, a box of sweets always within her reach, numberless pearls running through her ivory-colored fingers, a white satin coverlet covering her to the waist, her shoulders swathed in gauze and velvet and delicate cascades of ancient lace, she believed that she had died in her youth and was yet alive, that there were two selves, the dead, the living, that though she lay still, this beautiful corpse or effigy upon a marble sarcophagus, this was the living being, this with the bright, luminous eyes, the distracting visions, the endless stream of imaginary company, of fawns crowned with flowers, men who were birds, women whose heads were turrets, that the one who was dead was walking, walking by the sea, or riding a white horse through endless surf.

Thus she was peaceful. She had been frothing at the mouth once in her lunar hysteria, at least had been in great danger of losing her mind, but her madness had been averted through this means of slumberous life, had been regulated by the needle pits in her arm, the opium dosages, the sedatives, the dreams which went almost according to schedule, a moment extended, revolving like another planet, the enormity of space, and one familiar with her routines could almost have predicted, moment to moment, as by the readings of the barometer, the flickerings of the stars, her ghostly visitors, the lost constellations, the dead queens, the dead kings, the seasons, the years, the vanished tides, the life-sized chessmen moving in the garden, two sister ravens who had created the universe, the dead creation. She was ever the unchanging, changing only her mind, her body remaining always the same, that of the beautiful corpse who had peopled a void, she seeming hypothetical herself even to those one or two who knew her best, she seeming abstract, out of this world, surrounded by conscious cherubim, ethereal, drifting above the clouds, her eyes shining with tender or brilliant dreams, her dark hair as black as midnight, her neck and shoulders gleaming with snow-white satins and laces and the shadows of sable plumes, the velvet counterpane strewn over with white flowers as if it had been the coffin lid, the curious bed carved with fantastic figures seeming mobile, lutes, angels, arabesques, her face shadowed, powdered to conceal the invisible blemish, her life so seductive in its enchanted suspension that there were many who had not questioned her choice, who had only envied it, that extension of existence in isolation from the brutal facts, that death breathing in the midst of heightened sensitivity, her atmosphere of thought, her bedroom crowded with distinguished callers, some with golden feathers, some with crowns, some who had walked out of their graves. She was always radiant, charmed to greet each shade, for her dreams needed carry no credentials other than that they were her dreams, and her questions were ambivalently answered.

Why, as that birthmark was invisible, had she gone to bed in the first place, she who had been the most vivid of hostesses, even when there was no one, she who had been a rider with the hunt, even when there was no fox? Her own answers were many, varying with her stormy moods, her dazzling whims. She had gone to bed because of the invisible birthmark, the stain on her left cheek, because of the coldness of the snow, because of the wealth of her inheritance, that great wealth of burnished jewels and watery estates which had burdened her and made her different from others, because of the advice of tender, abstruse physicians who had foreseen, perhaps mistakenly, that if she walked, she would lose her mind, be mad like the others, because all those she loved had abandoned her and left her to the ravens in deserts, because of her social humiliations in Boston, because she had been refused admission to a fine hotel. She had gone to bed because her husband, a professional ne’er-do-well, a sportsman who had sported everywhere but in his bed, had left her with the unwanted child born of their fugitive marriage, with the immense sense of a meaningless woe expressed by flesh and blood, because he had abandoned her, leaving her unprotected and alone, the prey to strangers. She had married, as she sometimes recalled, the poorest man she knew, one she had hardly known but whose intense pity for the poor and whose desire to level the rich she had so greatly admired, little dreaming that he would become, in a single night, the richest man she knew, that he would emerge as only another of the international nightclub play boys, an irresponsible character running up long distance telephone calls to various ladies, those he never visited, keeping great kennels of dogs he never saw, polo ponies he never rode, yachts he never travelled in, sail-boats he could not rig, both tall ketches and long-winged sloops, a man whose great and only pleasure was to walk in a high wind on a waxed rope between two peaks above the Alpine clouds or where those diffused bodies of visible vapors floated against his face, blinding his eyes, a man whose dream had been always of the heights, the depths, the shifting shapes, who had already tried to scale her immaterial heights and had lost footing. Scaling the Jungfrau or Matterhorn, one of those perilous peaks, for she was always nebulous as to which, it making little difference to her, he had fallen head first, disappearing under a bank of snow and granite, and was never found, not even by the thrifty Swiss, but if he had been found, would have been still the uncorrupted dandy, preserved like herself in some fairy grotto of rock crystal chandeliers and musical stalactites, and had been wearing a white rose on his coat lapel when last seen, so should be easily recognized, and had always carried his cane, his calling card. Sometimes she thought he had disappeared in a spring snowslide in the Dolomites, a roof-top of snow falling, palpable as veil clouds, softer than cherry blossoms upon his head. She was sufficiently vague. He had been only her ex-husband, moreover, for she had already separated from him and paid him a fortune to go as far away as he could, to disappear, never to return again with her other callers. She had gone to bed for no reason at all, only that she had found the so-called real world unsatisfactory, that life had failed her, that her sensations had been numbed, that she had missed the contiguous impressions which might have been hers, that she had always been confined. Her body had failed her.

Her own mind had been all that was left to provide for her a better world, cities, mountains, dead faces, vague, clouded longings, and she could not tell where the divide was between what was real and what was unreal, for the unreal things were real to her, an exile on this subjective star, and the real were unreal. The dreams begot the only realities, and the dreams had begotten her, and she was their creation. She had not created the dreams, for they had created her, making her all she was and more than even she could realize. The opium enchantment was bountiful, expanding her soul to a far, enlarged horizon, making the impossible not only possible but plausible in her bright eyes which saw too much or yet too little. There had been, to keep her alive and everlastingly fascinated, her own irrational soul dilated and at large, as she realized, its wandering, illusive magnificence, its many shapes and forms, the lives of the inanimate objects to whom she endowed her speculative consciousness, the harps, the golden chairs, the plates of gold, the frozen chandeliers, the bellropes, the candle flames reflected in dark mirrors, the things enlarged out of proportion or reduced to infinitesimal size, the ghostly golf courses, the vague tennis courts, the plop-plopping of balls, the beclouded archery range and the magnified chessmen, all the empty, echoing, shadow-shrouded rooms, all her surroundings being nothing but the externalizations of her dreams, memories, impressions, floating and fragmentary, all the furnitures of earth and choirs of obsessed angels being also only an idea in the mind of God, and God was dead or sleeping as she was. Everything for her, the animated, bejeweled corpse, was complete, even the incompletion, the sense of palpable loss. She turned her face away from what she could not admit. She saw only what she wanted to see.

Then, according to one or two who knew her, she had gone to bed to escape from the domination of her father who had died before her marriage and who had been a wealthy manufacturer upon a mass scale, fabulously successful, a self-made man outdistancing all his disorganized rivals, his factories having been conducted like clockwork, wheels within wheels, and who had also been a man of severe personal disciplines, of orthodox faith of his own manufacture, himself controlled by the most fantastic rituals each hour of day or night, his house being conducted like a church although perhaps he was its only member, and a place set at his table for the wanderer angel, a salt shaker, a crystal goblet, a plate of gold, a spoon, a knife, an oyster fork, a napkin, a napkin ring, and he would turn no beggar away from his door for fear it might be an angel in disguise. He was always looking for an angel who had come from Tarsus or some far place. She had denied her father’s domination, even Our Heavenly Father Who, perhaps a greater manufacturer than her father, had set the stars in motion and had divided the waters from the earth and had created great whales, but the table was still laid for the dead, and there were the empty chairs, the twelve goblets for the twelve hours in their places, the dull silver shining, white roses at the centerpiece. She was the agnostic, but the angels surrounded her in her opium paradise, their fleecy wrings outspreading, shadowing her cheek, and the harpers harped, and the seas were turned to glass. She was ever the luminous, a mind which could leave the body.

She would imagine, in some slow moment of awakening, that the chandelier was Mr. Chandelier, her companion, not always faithful. There was also Mr. Res Tacamah, the drug bottle with ears to hear her ravings, her commands. She would imagine herself as living not at the edge of the sea but at the edge of the desert, that a bearded burro was her saintly companion, that there were chameleons crawling on her bed, her gold and ivory empire dressing table with its shadowed mirror, all the colors of an absent rainbow which was ever in her own mind. She would imagine that the house was crowded with the most amazing callers, their calling cards dropping from the ceiling, that the spacious rooms echoed with the voices of the dead and not with the sea, that she was surrounded by proud Bostonians, Platonists of the period of the intellectual flowering of Athens, drowned sailors, gold-turbaned Egyptians, centaurs with lilies in their mouths, cherubim spouting fountains, great frogs with jewels in their foreheads, men who had walked out of their watery graves, some who were living in another country. The air was filled with the strangest music. No one else could hear it.

She did not always realize her lack of communication with others, the living, their depths, for it was the ghost of love she loved the most, and that was always present. There was never an empty moment—or if so, never an acknowledged one. Phantoms buzzing around her like wild honey bees, like bottle flies, like gnats, pearl-divers diving above her swollen head, bubbles of light emitting from their mouths, the void filled with disoriented stars, leaden bells, golden echoes, acoustic errors, reverberations without cause or source, angelic intuitions. There were twelve grand pianos in the house, and no one ever played them.

She was downright rude at times, in fact, to her one faithful caller in the world of the sentient living, he whose presence could always be relied on, punctual as the evanescent evening light, the paste-colored, flabby Mr. Spitzer whom she had known since her girlhood but whom she addressed formally by his last name as if he still occupied, in her mind, the status of a dubious stranger. He bored her almost to extinction, for he was less illuminated, more dense than the angels, even as he knew. Though he had not been well for years, though the responsibility had been almost too great for him, though he had barely kept his secret life, he had been more faithful than she realized or cared to acknowledge. It was a long, puffing walk for him, but he came in the evenings down the ribboned sea road for that unwelcomed visit which his own sense of honor or habit had imposed, the feeling that he was her guardian. This feeling, she openly resented, saying that no one had asked him to come. What else, however, could he have done, he being, as he hoped, the man he was? He did not believe in Fate but in self-determination—yet Fate had assigned this peculiar role to him, and he could not resist it. He came alone each evening, walking a long way, exercising himself beyond his physical means, accompanied only by his shadow, that of his high silk hat, his cape, his cane, and punctually, as if he were welcome or had been expected, presented himself in her shrouded bedroom, always unaccompanied, so far as he could see, by anybody else. With him, however, she sometimes counted in, much to his interstellar confusion and possibly to hers, the spirit of his dead twin brother who had departed this mortal life so many years ago, it must have been shortly before her retirement to the bed of her heavenly dreams, a bed she imagined as a swan boat wafted by soft, perfumed winds. She would always say, of course, that it was only after the brother’s untimely death that she had retired from the possible world to the impossible—would not admit, though there were many arguments to prove otherwise, that it was before, that she had already made her choice, or that her choice had chosen her.

Mr. Spitzer was patient, having known her in her earlier years, that she had never changed, that she had been constantly inconstant, having known her perhaps longer than she had known him and having always loved her in his hopeless way, as she would sometimes remind him, that his love had not been returned, that it had bored her to the last degree of extinction or beyond it. As for himself, he was a semi-retired lawyer, one who had seemed to have, in his own sad youth, great promise of a brilliant legal career which, however, only for a short period had seemed to hover upon the margin of realization, having faded like his imagination, his gifts of ethereal musical composition, so many other things, for truly, his life had been broken by his brother’s sudden and unexpected death, and he had thus practiced law in only the most desultory fashion, often without fee, preferring the lost causes, and he had written only silent music, that which, for many years now, no one else had ever heard. His stupidity was now become, in fact, his only unusual gift, almost sublime, having increased with the years like his waistline, his paunchiness, his conflicted, clouded factual-mindedness. He was almost safely familiar with the lucid ravings of the charming invalid. He was not easily thrown off his guard. He could not be easily persuaded, he believed, even by the intoxicating, contagious madness of an angelic, lawless woman he had always compassionately, profoundly loved, one for whom he would have sacrificed his life, his being, his own best interests, having loved her just as much as his dead brother had hated her, scorning impatiently her love, not returning it, even making light of it in a most high-handed manner, even saying she had only pretended to be insane. Perhaps Mr. Spitzer loved her even more than his brother had hated her. His brother had been insolent, a gambler, a spender of borrowed money, a quick suicide, a four-flusher with a quick come-back, a ready apology or the banal dismissal of the need for apology, very different from cautious Mr. Spitzer who claimed never to have placed a bet on even that which he had been most certain of. His brother had been worldly, but Mr. Spitzer had always been, if he might sometimes say so, unworldly and abstruse.

Though she tormented Mr. Spitzer endlessly, sometimes implying that he did not exist, it was perhaps because, after all, in spite of the fact that she could be committed to no one, her imagination floating through unknown amplitudes, she had become grudgingly fond of him, this one faithful caller, he at least providing her a rare amusement. She was always making light of his seriousness, his offended, defenseless moods, his permanently aggrieved air. She was always seeking to confuse and confound him, to throw him off his mental balance, to make him think twice as he most certainly did. By her wandering, abstracted remarks, she would imply that there were others present besides himself in her shadowed bedroom, crippled Mr. Alexander Pope, for example, he who had been scorned by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Lord Byron with his club foot, Shelley’s bright hair like a comet in the wind, blind Milton dictating Paradise Lost to those indifferent daughters, lost constellations, meteor flashes, colloquies of angels, that her faithful caller had certainly come to a place different from any he had supposed, the Boston South Station crowded with submarine musicians, watery apparitions dripping with worlds like pearls, mad sextons who had buried the wrong people, themselves, ski trains of the vanished skiers, snow upon their peaked faces, a social gathering, a maze, a garden party, the unwindings of time in one long instant. In fact, her devices for the confusion of Mr. Spitzer were endless if repetitive like her dreams and visions which floated in the air, homeless as if there were no earth. Mr. Spitzer, however, was not easily moved, could note that there were apparently no invisible presences, that this was not a public street corner as she sometimes implied, not a bar-room, that there was no bloody face staring through a window, that everything was as it had been before in a place of elegant desolation, that the stars no doubt continued in their courses, that the threads of reality had not been unwound and wound around different spindles from those he had presumed. He would only sigh, yawn, look vacant, try to change the subject, ignore the question. Had he met his brother as he was climbing the second marble stairway or the great rock? Had he seen himself recently? Had he met her in the seventh crystal drawing room? Why had he given her none of his time but the last dance, the silent music, the stupidity, the silence of man? Why had he been so selfish and self-centered?

Mr. Spitzer, she would ask of a now defunct attorney, he with his colorless face half slumberous, his high silk hat in his lap, his hands folded listlessly over his ivory-headed cane, tell me, is there or is there not an invisible elephant in the corridor leading to this bedroom? But the burden of proof, Mr. Spitzer had always hesitantly maintained, smoothing his grey velvet culls, his mouth yawning, his eyes dimmed, rested not on him but on my mother who had seen the invisible. And why should an elephant rest on her, she would want to know, such a huge elephant, a composition of sultry light beams, and with such a long memory, it could remember everything, and much more besides, even himself, Mr. Spitzer who was obliterated by time, even his dead twin brother, even the decapitated, bleeding head of John the Baptist and John the Baptist’s memories most personal? Besides, if there was no elephant, then what was an elephant doing in the house?

Mr. Spitzer, an increasingly careful man who was always protective of his failing health, moderate of his tastes, whose habits were as punctual as his almost perfect watch allowed, and that was a jeweled watch which marked the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the days, the nights, the years, the revolutions of the planets around the sun, their relative distance and magnitudes, a starry wheel, would lean forward to cover my mother’s dimpled foot with a purple drapery, never touching her foot, of course, as he was too polite to engage in fleshly proximity, and she had long ago rejected him with a finality leaving no doubt in his mind.

Her foot, she continually complained, threatened to get out of bed and walk by itself. Her foot was but the monument in a desert, treeless campagna. Her foot, fat, ivory-colored, flushed with rose, pulsing as if it might have a separate life, vaguely shocked him, perhaps stirring old, dusty memories, those which almost no one else could share with him except herself who had known him in his young manhood before his career was broken or practically stopped by his brother’s death in an almost forgotten year. She had made her choice of retirement from the world long ago, and now in her advanced years, as he realized, even if she had wished to do so, even if she had always been sane, could not have walked again without endangering her life, what remained of it, to say nothing of her immortal beauty, the unstained beauty which must have made her quite famous in circles of the dead. He did not hold with those who thought she could walk if she wanted to, that her illness was an illusion, nor with others who were almost convinced that she walked when they were sleeping. He dismissed as mere superstition the fears of some of the servants that she must certainly walk at night, for they had seen the evidence of her nocturnal journeys, a bare footprint on a marble stair, the streak of her long white nightgown in the dust, the imprint of a medallion, and how else could she know so much? If she did not walk secretly at night, her dark hair drifting like a cloud, how could she have suffered, through all these years, no deterioration, and how could she have known so much, the servants fearfully reasoned, that the cook was feeding a secret husband whom no one had ever seen, that a dead seagull had been blown into a living room, unnoticed by anyone, that rooms which had been closed for years seemingly had been occupied, that there was crystal dust gathering on a distant windowsill, that someone had left the icebox open, that the second butler was drunk in the wine cellar, sleeping it off, dreaming of snakes and headless horsemen and maelstroms and mermaids with hooves, that an Irish maid had said a prayer for her brother’s soul because of the burning of unbaptized babes and of green leaves in Purgatory, a temporary state forever in transition? Was she omniscient, following everywhere, her jeweled fingers reaching like mist, even Mr. Spitzer wondered, for seemingly, there was no lost perception which was not hers, no cough in a dark street she had not heard, no whisper which had not roared in her ears?

She would swear, often even to Mr. Spitzer’s genuine confusion, that she was already walking and dead, that she had followed him at times he had not realized. She knew where he had been even when he had not told her of his latest journey, his crossing great chasms. He would knit his heavy brow in thought as if she were describing something lawless, as if, much against his will and better judgment, he might find himself involved in an illegal adventure, a game of chance, a number’s racket, a baseball game of which the score was already known as if the future were the past. He would try his best to hold himself together, not to betray his anxiety. He would pull at his feathery and colorless mustache, scarcely at times