To Make Death Love Us (5 page)

The world changed,
got older and tired and the white stone of old Baltimore grew grey and the sidewalks fell into
disrepair. Once-gracious houses were broken up into tenements, all the grace and majesty of what
had gone
before disappeared under the
grinding hell of poverty, under the terrible reality of life in the black ghetto.

In the very heart
of this ghetto, there stood a strong anachronism, a single house which withstood the ravages
wrought by the jungle of the city. In this house, which would soon know murder, the world outside
seldom en­tered. It's windows were still veiled with delicate lace curtains in a pattern of
bluebirds holding cartouches of ribbons in their beaks. The boot scraper at the door was painted
shining black and the stone steps were freshly painted white every three months. Even the shadows
cast by the surviving trees opposite the front door—and still caged in wrought iron—seemed
undimmed by the dirt and filth of the overindustrialized city. The trees budded in spring with
the very palest of green.

The children of the
ghetto—for no reason they could or would explain—respected the caged trees and the house and the
people who lived within it. They were—the peo­ple who lived in this strange house—in their
fashion, the neighborhood's private mystery and special treasure.

The people who
lived within the mystery were white gentry whose bloodlines went so far back in the history of
the pre-Civil War South that they seemed wrapped in magnolia and legend.

The husband, Enoch
Pratt, was frequently consulted by various historical societies, for he was the possessor of a
most unique library of long-out-of-print books concerning Baltimore's history. He had made of
himself the curator of the past. A curiosity lay in the fact that he was unaware of it. He saw
himself, did Enoch Pratt, as very much a keeper of the present. It was not his fault that his
present was everyone else's past.

Enoch dressed in
slender trousers with elastic straps that looped beneath the insteps of his short boots, a style
fifty years out of date. His shirts were made by an old firm
that kept the pattern in use in order to fill the occasional requests of
theatrical costumers and historical-drama soci­eties. The sleeves were puffed at the wrists, the
front heavy with pleating, and the collars high.

His wife, Mary,
also dressed in the fashion of the 1800s, her hair always in the intricate, curled fashion of
days gone by.

Their dealings with
the outside world were conducted almost exclusively through tradesmen who delivered. They
subscribed to no newspapers or magazines, had no radio, and generally lived as if what was so was
not so.

It was a rare and
exceedingly fine madness.

Of course, in
avoiding the world so completely, it changed all around them and they were unaware of it. What
they believed to be so became so, as far as they were concerned.

Their principal
outing of the year occurred upon the seventh of October. Upon that day, they traveled— largely
afoot, since their attempts to hire a horse-drawn carriage presented great difficulty—to
Westminster Churchyard.

There they placed a
rose-encrusted wreath upon the grave of Edgar Allan Poe.

They almost never
spoke to the people they passed on the street. Upon occasion they would nod to the verger of
Westminster Church and he would nod in return and wish a good day to Mr. and Mrs. Enoch
Pratt.

Enoch would regale
his wife on their return journey— back to their home and to the century that was more to their
liking—with the oft-told tale of how it had been his own great-great-great-grandfather who had
long ago pub­lished many of Edgar Allan Poe's works.

It was from that
same publishing house—printers of textbooks and inspirational works—that the Pratts de­rived
their income, that stipend that allowed them to
deny nearly all that had happened in the world since the death of Poe.

They were both
quite mad but not dangerously so.

In the year 1940, a
natural thing happened that they could not deny. Mary Pratt became pregnant. She took to her bed
and eventually delivered a baby girl in the same bed it had been conceived in.

The family doctor,
an old man who loved them in their gentle madness, took Enoch aside and explained a bit more of
the facts of heredity than Enoch, till then, had been aware of. Their child had been born
afflicted with albinoism.

"And this
albinoism, pray tell, what is its cause?" Enoch Pratt asked.

"It may be from a
total absence of pigmentation cells, interference with their migration to their intended
loca­tions during development of the embryo, or the lack of the necessary hormonal
stimulation."

"Ah," said Enos, no
more enlightened than before. "And what is the reason for its appearance?"

The doctor
hesitated, on the edge of knowledge he was reluctant to reveal. "Consanguinity can figure into it
prominently."

Enoch smiled rather
coldly. "I see. At least, I think I do. Then you are saying it is a punishment for marrying first
cousin to first cousin?"

"Not a punishment
but a consequence, perhaps," the doctor said, unruffled in the face of Enoch's own illusion. The
doctor had known them both since they were chil­dren. The truth was, Mary was Enoch's own sister,
not his first cousin. Perhaps it was incest, and their pretence that what had happened did not
happen, that had driven the Pratts into full retreat into another century. In any case, it was
not the doctor's concern; it was the child who had to be dealt with.

"What special care
must be given to the child?"

"She lacks the
pigmentation that normally screens against light rays. The sun will be a great danger to her,"
cautioned the doctor.

A small smile that
might be described as complacent, or even self-satisfied, quirked the corners of Enoch's
mouth.

"Even her eyes lack
protection. They will be painfully sensitive to light."

Enoch's smile
broadened.

"Well, then, what a
perfect place for her to have been born. We rarely leave the house and the shades are nearly
always drawn," he said with rather perfect logic.

The doctor sighed,
placed his hands on his knees, and stood up. Perhaps Enoch was right. What better place for a
moon child to be born than into a fairy tale?

When the little one
first opened her eyes in the soft glow of candlelight, they were not much dazzled. They did,
however, sparkle with those red reflections that mark the gaze of the albino. The irises were the
palest of gray and somewhat wispy, like the rings that often surround the autumn moon.

"Oh, what a love!
What a delight!" Enoch cooed, as his wife smiled softly in the near-dark with equal
delight.

And in their own
little world, it all seemed right and proper.

In time, the fairy
tale acquired dark moments of its own. It was discovered that Serena—for that was the name they
chose for her—had incapacities much greater than a simple loss of pigmentation. The doctor came
to examine her and diagnosed that she suffered, as well, from a congenital atrophy of the lower
limbs. Serena's natural functions would not be impaired—through ther­apy she would walk after a
fashion—but gone would be the running, jumping, leaping joys of normal childhood.

The doctor's heart
ached when he had to offer news of this new disaster to Enoch, but Enoch only smiled
again.

"It is a pity, of
course, but, then, what better household could a child who will suffer difficulty in getting
about be born into? We have no need of the world outside of this house."

The doctor nodded
as he put his instruments back into his battered black bag. As he prepared to take his leave of
them, he pondered the fact that God, apparently, had prepared the child for the best life it
could hope for in this strange home.

Serena was given a
room of her own when she was six. It was adorned with murals illuminating the stories of the
Grimms and Hans Christian Andersen. The colors were so pale as to be the merest breath of color.
Still, as a backdrop to the luminous child, they were crashingly vivid. The room was filled with
the plush toys of a bygone era. White rabbits, white elephants, white mice, and white ducks with
pale yellow bills. There were shelves filled with old-fashioned picture books of another
age.

Enoch commissioned
a young artist and a young writer to create a small book telling the tale of "Serena, Moon Child"
in a gentle, loving, and fantastic way. One copy only was printed which made it, by far, the most
expen­sive of all children's books. Further adventures appeared every year until she was twelve.
It was in that year that she began to go blind.

For the first and
only time, Enoch cried over the trials of his little fairy princess and wondered about the wisdom
of his marriage. Mary took the news with greater courage. Serena took it with the greatest
courage of all. She asked that a chair, with pillows piled high, be placed in the front window so
that she could see and store up visions of the world.

The black children
of the neighborhood wondered about the magic child and were always silent when they passed by her
window. They would wave and smile at her and she would wave and smile in return. Sometimes, they
brought small gifts, deposited furtively on the doorstep. A ball, a rag doll, a small bag of
marbles. They were, in a way, offerings to a goddess.

Sometimes the
children stood on the sidewalk and whis­pered their whispers to her, even though from that
dis­tance it would have been impossible for her to hear them. Somehow, they believed, she would
mysteriously know, and in some magical way, make their wishes come true.

It took a full year
before her sight was completely gone.

Serena feared the
velvet dark at first and regretted desperately that she could no longer read. She did, for a
time, become hypersensitive to the touch of anything upon her. The doctor feared a new
affliction. It passed away in time, though a great sensitivity of touch stayed in her
hands.

Not long after she
went totally blind, Serena discov­ered, quite by chance, that she could read the slight
im­pressions left by type upon the page in the normal way of printing. Knowing the shapes of
letters, she was able to read the large typefaces, and then smaller ones, until her hands would
fly across the pages like tiny, white hum­mingbirds. Her hands moved so quickly, interpreting the
slightly engraved surface, that she saw nearly as well as someone with the gift of
sight.

There was a second
gift that awaited her, that did not awaken until it was needed—a more awesome, almost terrible
gift.

Serena's blindness
was a blow that shattered Enoch Pratt's entire fabric of fantasy. His marriage, his whole
fantastic retreat from the world, came crashing down
around his ears. The world around him suddenly became evil, cold, and
unforgiving.

His marriage had
taken on the evil aspects of the doomed in the tales of his beloved Edgar Allan Poe.

Enoch saw himself
somehow trapped in a tale more macabre than any his idol, Poe, had ever created. In his despair,
he took to drink.

And passed
eventually into a madness deeper and more terrifying than any Poe had ever dreamed of. Awake or
asleep, he lived in a phantasm, a living hell eating at the edges of his being. He became
aware—suddenly, it seemed—that his white family, his milk-white girl, were living in a sea of
black faces. One night, drunk, he left the house and walked through the neighborhood, hair
dishev­eled and eyes wild.

He stumbled down
the mean streets, his mind aflame with tormented images, made all the more hideous in the garish
neon-lit streets of the century he had too long de­nied.

Serena's second
gift awoke in her. It was in the shape of a dream. She lay on a coverlet of light silk and
dreamed. Her father's madness, his pain filled the dream.

Enoch moved among
the blacks, screaming, "Get back to the plantation!"

Hostile eyes
impaled him, conversations halted, and a silent storm of faces turned to consider this strange
appa­rition from the past walking before them.

The madness was
upon him full tilt. The old hates and prejudices of another century swam in his brain like blind
cave fish. Enoch waved his arms at them, screaming, "Don't you darkies know your masters will
take good care of you? Don't do this foolish thing! Where will you go? What will you
do?"

A black child tried
to take his hand and lead him back home. She did not understand this strangely dressed
white man's rage or his madness. She only knew
he be­longed, somehow, to the magic child in the house, and she thought he might be
lost.

Enoch, with
misguided zeal, stooped down and tried to embrace the little girl.

"Ginny Mae, you
come here! Ginny Mae!" the little girl's older sister yelled from the stoop of an old house. "You
stay away from that crazy white man!"

"He's okay. It's
only Mr. Pratt," said Ginny Mae.

The sister came
down off the stoop and swept the little girl aside, putting herself between the white man and the
child.