Visions of Gerard (11 page)

I've since dreamed it a million times, down the corridors of Seeming eternity where there are a million mirrored figures sitting thus and each the same, the house on Beaulieu Street the night Gerard died and the assembled Duluozes wailing with green faces of death for fear of death in time, and Time's consumed it all already, it's a dream already a long time ended and they dont know it and I try to tell them, they wanta slap me in the kisser I'm so gleeful, they send me upstairs to bed—An old dream too I've had of me glooping, that night, in the parlor, by Gerard's coffin, I dont see him in the coffin but he's there, his ghost, brown ghost, and I'm grown sick in my papers (my writing papers, my bloody ‘literary career' ladies and gentlemen) and the whole reason why I ever wrote at all and drew breath to bite in vain with pen of ink, great gad with indefensible Usable pencil, because of Gerard” (
Écrivez pour l'amour de son mort
) (as one would say, write for the love of God)—for by his pain, the birds were saved, and the cats and mice, and the poor relatives crying, and my mother losing all her teeth in the six terrible weeks prior to his death during which time she stayed up all night every night and grew such a mess of nerves in her stomach that her teeth began falling one by one, might sight funny to some hunters of conceit, but this wit has had it.

Lord bless it, an Ethereal Flower, I saw it all blossom—they packed me to bed. They raved in the kitchen and had it their way.

There's the rocking chair, Uncle Mike's wife had it, the peculiar dreary voice she had, fast way she talked, things I cant utter but I'd roll and broil in butter, the gurgle in their throats—I could recount the dreary yellings and give you all the details—It's all in the same woods—It's all one flesh, and the pieces of it will come and go, alien hats and coats not to the contrary—Uncle Mike had a greenish face: he had barrelsful of pickles in Nashua, a sawdust oldtime store, meat-hacks and hung hams and bas kets of produce on the sidewalk: fish in boxes, salted.—Emil's brother,—“So
vain
, so full of ego, people—shut your mouth you” he finally says to his wife, “I'm talkin tonight—in the great silence of our father we'll find the reasons for our prides, our avarices, our dollars—It's better any way, now that he's dead his belly doesnt hurt any more and his heart and his legs, it's better”—

“Have it your way,” says my father listlessly.

“Ah Emil Emil dont you remember when we were children and we slept together and Papa built his house with his own hands and all the times I helped you—we too we'll die, Emil, and when we're dead will there be someone,
one person
for the love of God, who'll be able to look at us in our coffins and say ‘It's all over, the
marde
, the fret, the force, the strength'?—more's the strength in the belly than anywhere else—finished, bought, sold, washed, brought to the great heaven! Emil dont cry, dont be discouraged, your little boy is better—remember you well what Papa used to say in back of his stove—”

“With his bottle on Sunday mornings, aw sure that one was a smart one!” (the wife).

“Shut your mouth I said!—All men die—And when they die as child, even better—they're
pure
for heaven—Emil, Emil,—poor young Emil, my little brother!”

They shake their heads violently the same way, thinking.

“Ah”—they bite their lips the same way, their bulgey eyes are on the floor.

“It ends like it ends”—

My mother's upstairs sobbing, lost all her control now—The aunts are cleaning out the death bed, there's a great to do of sheets and an end to sheets, a Spring cleaning.

“I brought him on earth, in my womb, the Virgin Mary help me!—in my womb, with pain—I gave him his milk!—I took care of him—I stood at his bedside—I bought him presents on Christmas, I made him little costumes Halloween—I'd make his nice oatmeal he loves so much in the mornings!—I'd listen to his little stories, I examined his little pictures he drew—I did everything in my power to make his little life contented—inside me, outside me,
and returned to the earth!
“ wails my mother realizing the utter hopeless loss of life and death, the completely defeated conditionality and partiality of it, the pure mess it entails, yet people go on hoping and hoping—“I did everything,” she sobs with handkerchief to face, in the bedroom, as the Bradleys, Aunt Pauline, her sister, come in, from New Hampshire, “and it didnt work—
he died any how
—They took him off to Heaven!—They didnt leave him with me!—Gerard, my little Gerard!”

“Calm yourself, poor Ange, you've suffered so.”

“I havent suffered like he did, that's what
breaks
my heart!” and she yells that and they all know she really means it, she's had her fill of the injustice of it, a little lame boy dying without hope—“It's
that
that's tearing my heart out and breaking my head in two!”

“Ange, Ange, poor sensitive heart!” weeps gentle Aunt Marie at her shoulder.

Nin and I are sobbing horribly in bed side by side to hear these pitiful wracks of clack talk coming from our own human mother, the softness of her arms all gashed now in the steely proposition Death—

“I'll never be able to wipe that from my memory!”

“Not as long as I live!”—“He died
without
a chance!”

“We all die—”

“Good, damn it, good!” she cries, and this sends chills thru all of us man and child and the house is One Woe this night.

Meanwhile, insanely, our cousins Edgar and Roland have sneaked off with the firecrackers to the backyard, and like leering devils, which they arent really, but as much as like satyrs and Mockers and be-striders of misfortune, there they are setting off all our precious firecrackers, Nin's and mine and Gerard's, at midnight, callously, a veritable burning of the books of the Duluozes, Ker plack, whack, c a ka ta r a k sht boom!

“
Les mauva, les mauva
,” (mean! mean!) Ti Nin and I scream in pillows—

The Bradleys are going to drive us to Nashua for the night and bring us back for the funeral in 48 hours—With Gerard and the firecrackers all gone, and Ma crying on the very floor, we had better be driven somewhere—

When Ti Nin and I were little.

Then comes the solemn funeral, Nin and I are taken back on a rainy dreary day to see the house all one great Gloom Shrine full of kids from the St. Louis Parochial School filing in and out in frightened parades, their eyes straining to see the deadface in the unholy velvet pillow among the flowers, the sooner they see it the quicker they'll know the face of death and fears be justified all—And files of nuns, standing by the coffin, praying with long black wooden rosaries—All dolled up in little necktie I cant believe it's my own house and this, this World Parlor with Histories of Black being written in it, the very selfsame silly drowsy parlor where I'd sat and goofed away whole long afternoons chubbling with my lips or going goopy goopy at the window passers, or with Gerard (whose head I hold no claim on any more) held head-to-head confabs and listened to the holy lazy silence of Time as it washed and washed forever more—But now, his bier a glory, in death all Splendidified, banished-from-hair-earth and admitted-to-Perfectness he lies, commemorating our parlor silently, tho no one knows precisely what I know—But others know some thing of him I never knew, the nuns, and some of the boys, and mayhap Père Lalumière the
Curé
who now in the kitchen with one ecclesiastical blackshoe up on a chair and manly elbow on knee assured my mother “Ah well, be not anxious, Mrs. Duluoz, he was a little saint! He's certainly in Heaven!”

That was the reason for the big crowd, they came to see the little boy in the neighborhood who had died and gone to heaven, and housewives even that day began noticing and announcing that the flock of birds, the nation of phebes and peewits and meek and lowly whatnots that had pestered at his window for so long since Spring broke in, was gone—

“They're gone completely.”

“You dont see one.”

“It's ‘cause it's rainin!”

But the next day, and the next day, and the next day after that, the little ones revisited no more the scene of the deicide—

“They're gone with him!”

Or, I'd say, “It was himself.”

Unforgettable the files of children come to see the cheek they knew so well in classrooms, to see its loss of lustre pink, and estimate the value of death—With what avid and horrified eyes they gazed on little Schoolmate so reposy silent in his ornate bed—What horror even just to approach the house and see the wreath, with the fatal pale blue ribbon, and the fatal drawn shades in the parlor—The vultures do feed on disconsolate such-rooftops when you look, the chimney exudes angels of fear like whirligigs of gray butterflies . . .

What you learn the first time you get drunk at sixteen, tugging at old urinaters in Moody Street saloons and yelling “Dont you realize you are God?” is what you learn when you understand the meaning that's here before you on this heavy earth: living but to die . . . look at the sky, stars; look at the tomb, dead—In invoking the help, Transcendental help from other spheres of this Imaginary Blossom, invoke at least, by plea, for the learning of the lesson:—help me understand that I am God—that it's all God—Urinating, alone, wont get you far—It happens, every day, in all the latrines of Samsara—
Here and Now
, said the children seeing “
Ti Gerard Duluoz qu'est mort
”—“it's not any harder'n that—they wont be able to punish me any more”—Beyond punishment, he lies, qualified for eternity and perfectness—“Is it
true
he's dead?—mebbe he's kidding”—and all the ghost feelings of men—But no, “that bareheaded life under grass” is no “blithe spirit”—It's the genuine death.

All the desperate praying in the stuffy parlor is scaring the kids half to death, they think “It'll happen to me too but look how they're all afraid of it?”

Clasped in Gerard's kindly fingers is a beautiful solid silver crucifix—There are flowers from relatives in Maine who couldnt come, from friends—All the people in the world who wear their daily face come passing with their final face, as, for instance, Manuel, sober, dark-attired, unaccostably silent, he wont even speak to the priest, to Emil he makes one regretful nod—He'll be one of the pallbearers.

Old Bull Baloon is gone west, wont be at the funeral.

The women, the aunts, stand at the back and are never weary of shaking their heads from side to side, and
lamenting the loss
, and talking about it—

Young priests make polite calls and add their powerful prayers and depart swiftly to duties in the gloom—One of them has such a handsome sad face, it's a shame he never married and presented it to some respectful wench—

“The young Lafontaine!”

“Aw oui—he comes from Montreal—I didnt know he was so short.”

“Yes but he's so pretty.”

“Pretty? Handsome as a heart—It's too bad—All the good men are bought up or else won.”

“One or the other.”

“Look here comes old lady Picard—she never misses one—”

“No—Oh well, the old lady, we'll accept her prayers.”

“Her prayers are not to be thrown away.”

“There—the little angels—another line—This one, they tell me it was Gerard's class—yes—the nuns are puttin em in front—there. The little angels. They're afraid.”

“Ah”—sigh—“they'll have to know
some
day, it happens to all of us.”

“Ah, but he was so young.”

“Look at that old bat across the street, she's burning her garbage and all the smoke blowin on the house of the dead with the wind.”

The house of the dead indeed, it was hardly my house—I'd lost Gerard in the shuffle.

High above, in the stormy sky, a bird with little buffeted birdy bones bats ahead, beak to the nose of the wind—Shrouds of gray rain fall Aweing and slanting to our crystal—It is the sky, the void, that no fist could form in and hold any part of it—Below, on the stain of earth, where we all, human brothers and sisters, pop like flower after flower from the fecund same joke of unstymied pregnant earth and raise standardbearers of fertility and ego-personality, life, below the blown shrodes and woe-bo blackclouds June is handing down from some whoreson unseasonal storm, patches of brown and yellow and black show where we live, chimneys are pouring black smoke—“The Chimbleys of the World!”—And we are angels revisiting it—Coming down, far, sad, wide, the world, the earth, this pot, this place, this parturience-organizer—There are the chimney smokes fuming up and pouring and defiling open space, and there the tracks, cracks, cities, dead cats floating in rivers, calendars on the wall indicating June 1926—License plates on old cars sayin Massachusetts, the helm and Chineemark of it—The name of a store, in gold leaf letters embossed and chipping already, “Lowell Provision Company,” a self-believing butcher with a handlebar mustache standing in the door, full of human hope and realistic sentimentality among the charnels and hacked thighs of his own making, bleedied in his blocks, his hands raw from blood-juice, red in fact—Shakespeare, Throwspeare, Disappear Spear, and where is the Provision made for a “cessation and a truce” to all this sprouting of being just so it can wilt and be sacked, canned—We the angel spirits, descend to this earth, earth indeed, we are awed to see living beings, living beings indeed, we see man there ghostly crystal apparition juggling as he goes in selfmade streets inside Mind a liquid phantom glur-ing on the brain ectoplasm—A vision in water—

Papier-mâché
canals flow in downtown Lowell, men smoking cigars stand by the rail spitting in the waters that reflect drizzle hopelessness of 1926—And to their way of thinking, ahem, the money in their pocket is real and the pride in their heads as real as sin and as solid as Hell—And the money that is real and the pride that is solid is about to buy an actual porkchop which tho it has since appeared (it is now 1956, Jan. 16, Midnight), the hunger with it, and the hungerer to boot, can still be called
real
, tho it neither
is not
, nor
is
, but beyond such considerations anyway, like a reflection of a porkchop on water—Facts well known by fat Mr. Groscorp who now, in his apartment across the street from the St. Louis Presbytère, on West Sixth Street, is about to partake of his noonday meal at the kitchen table by the rain drizzled window that looks down on the street where suddenly a slow caravanseri of limousines and flower-roadsters has rounded the corner from Beaulieu Street, and headed up to the church front, where official waiters minister with the proper silver special knobs—His face is huge, muckchop rich as kincobs, sleek as surah, gray pale and fetid to-make-you-sick, a great beast, with small mouth makes an oo of simpery delight, and great hanging jowls—A bathrobe, slippers, a fat cat—Winebottle and chops laid out—His huge paunch keeps him well away from his fork, and makes it necessary for the eating-chair to be scraped a good deal of the way back, so that he stoops, or rather hunches forward with huge mountainous determination, like a tunnel, to his about-to-be-eaten lunch—“Ah,” he interrupted, “another corpse!”—And he raises napkin to lips, and watches leaning up to see below closer—“In all this rain, they're gonna bury another one,—aw dammit, it's a pity, it spoils all my meal—It all goes down the same hole, why make such a great ceremonial fuss?—The solemnity, the gloves—the special gloves and the stiff legs—the little mousey smile—the little mustache—the big hunger for nothing to eat, or else the great famine in the richness of the season—One or t'other, it's all the same, because,” raising his eyes to the upper part of the window and examining the blown gust clouds, “you might say”—he burps delicately, lowering the shade—“That, there's plenty more where it came from, the comin and the goin—Outa my way, I'm eating—We'll think about it later—”