Masques

by J N Williamson

  Death came to the house approximately once a year. Not unpresaged: you could smell it coming. For this was when Baba’s—my grandmother’s—garden broke into rich bloom and the roses grew where they could be seen from any window of any room. Other preparations were made, too; the house underwent a thorough cleaning, as if in anticipation of the arrival of rich relatives; the cemetery—some two or three miles out of town—came aswarm with aunts, all bearing new flowers and vases. They clipped the tall weeds from around the headstones, they polished the marble with soft rags, they berated the caretaker for his slothful inattention. I once watched Aunt Nellie spend over an hour rubbing the grime out of the wings of a white stone cherub that marked the resting place of somebody’s stillborn infant, no one knew exactly whose. You could tell Death was coming by all these signs.

  The doctor, whom I thought of as the house physician, was so frequent a visitor to our place that we all considered him part of the family. He was a tremendously fat man: his face was continually flushed and he panted a lot, which was to him an unmistakable symptom of coronary thrombosis. Each year, for as many years as I can remember, he would prognosticate with the authority of the practicing physician that he couldn’t possibly last another six months. We always believed him. “I only wish one thing,” Dr. Cleveland used to say. “When I go, I want to go here.” That is, he wanted to die at our place. As things happened, he was one of the few in town who never did.

  We were located second from the railroad tracks. A restaurant, a cannery, a hobo jungle and the town depot were on the immediate perimeter and they were all so disreputable that Baba’s, with its fiercely shining coat of white paint, refinished each year, looked exceptionally genteel. It was an unusual house in that it was as perfectly square as a house can be: not one sliver of ornamentation, no balconies, no pillars, no filagree. It had two floors: four bedrooms upstairs, three below, plus an immense kitchen with a pantry as large as a bathroom. It was all kept fanatically clean.

  The furniture looked antique, and could very well have been, except that antiques cost money and no one in my family had much of that and no one was quite old enough to have acquired antiques first hand. It was a mellow hodgepodge of styles.

  The pictures on the walls were generally of large dogs. My grandmother had no fondness for dogs, however, and would never allow one in the house.

  When my mother and I moved there from Chicago, where I was born, I was installed in one of the unrented upstairs bedrooms. This was about the time I had discovered Edgar Allan Poe, and it was therefore not much of an encouragement when Baba let it slip that a gentleman had only two weeks previously passed on “in this very bed.” Like most of the others—at least one person had died in each room—the former occupant had been elderly; but, also like the others, he did not go quickly. No one went quickly at Baba’s. They all suffered from a fascinating variety of ills, usually of a lingering and particularly scabrous nature. “My” gentleman, a retired lumberman, had contracted some sort of a disease of the kidneys or intestines and, as Aunt Pearl reminisced, it had taken him several months “in the dying.”

  Heart trouble was the most frequent complaint, though. It seemed to me for a while that everybody in the house was going about clutching and reeling, catching at chairs, easing into bed, being careful not to laugh too hard.

  Nothing could shake my aunts’ firm belief that every disease, no matter what it might be, was contagious. When poor Mrs. Schillings was groaning out her last from advanced arthritis, movement had all but disappeared from our house. We creaked out of bed, we walked stiffly when we felt able to walk at all, and it was only after the funeral that the usual bustle was resumed. At the arrival of Mr. Spiker, who had come from his bachelor quarters across the way to die at Baba’s, conditions reached a low point. Mr. Spiker suffered from, among other things, what my grandmother called The Dance: the old man shook and quivered horribly. It was, of course, not long before we had all begun to tremble in similar fashion. I used to spend many agonizing moments with my hands outstretched, trying to keep the fingers steady. Aunt Pearl, better than the rest of us at this sort of thing, fell completely apart this time. She took to her bed and stayed there for several weeks, shuddering in giant spasms which even Mr. Spiker couldn’t match: he occasionally trembled his way over to comfort her. Later he died of an infected liver, a common sequel of drinking too much straight whiskey.

  And yet, with Death as much a part of life as it was then, Baba’s was certainly the most cheerful parlor in town. We would gather around the fire for hours every night and tell stories—generally in soft voices, so as not to disturb whoever might be dying elsewhere in the house.

  The subjects of conversation seldom veered from Sickness, Death and the Hereafter. Baba would spend forty-five minutes to an hour telling how her husband died as a result of an accident in the sawmill where he worked; Aunt Pearl—as with all my aunts, a widow—would describe the manner in which her husband departed this earth (“Pooched out like a balloon and then bust!”); that would lead to someone’s recollecting an article they’d read somewhere on how hypnosis was supposed to help cure cancer, and the next thing it would be time for bed.

  I don’t recall a completely easy moment I ever spent in the rooms they assigned me. Most often there was a peculiar smell, relative to the disease that carried off the former occupant: the sort of smell, like ether, that you can never quite get rid of. You can get it out of the air, but it stays in the bedsprings, in the furniture, in your head. My least favorite room was the one next to Baba’s.

  The walls here were a green stagnant-pool color and the bed was one of those iron things that are always making noise. Railroad calendars, picturing numerous incredibly aged Indian chiefs, hung lopsided on strings, and on the door, above the towel rack, there was a huge portrait of the Savior. This was painted in the same style as old circus posters, showing Him smiling and plucking from His chest cavity—realistically rendered with painstaking care and immense skill—a heart approximately five times the size of a normal one, encircled by thorns and dripping great drops of cherry-red blood.

  Now what with The Murders in the Rue Morgue or The Telltale Heart, the Indians on the wall and the portrait on the door, not to mention the atmosphere of disquiet, it seems odd that I should have decided just then to paint on the green iron flowered knobs of the bed’s head-pieces—with India ink—a series of horrible faces. That is what I did, nonetheless, and as there were twelve such knobs, I soon had twelve unblinking masks staring at me.

  At any rate, I was in no condition this night—a few nights after completing the heads—for one of Baba’s pranks. She was a great lover of practical jokes, my grandmother, and her sense of humor ran to the macabre.

  To give you an idea of what I mean, there was the time the lunatic escaped from Sedro-Wooley (this is where the insane asylum is). He’d been put there by reason of having cut off his wife’s head with an axe one night, along with his mother’s and some other relatives’. Now he was loose, and no matter how hard they looked for him, he simply wasn’t to be found. The countryside was thrown into a delicious panic: I wish I had a dollar for every time my aunts looked under the beds.

  Baba, then aged seventy-five, took this as a springboard for one of her most famous jokes. Here’s what happened:

  She went over to Mr. Howe’s shack—he was a bachelor and there was gossip about him and her—and borrowed some of his old clothes. Then she put these on, covering up her hair with a cap and dirtying her face, and got the short-handle hatchet from the wood-house. She waited a little while—it was quite late, but we were all light sleepers: the drop of a pin would have made Aunt Myrtle and especially Aunt Dora sit bolt upright—then she crept into the house and stationed herself inside the closet of Aunt Myrtle’s room.

  Now Aunt Myrtle frequently got frightened and would literally leap at the sight of her own reflection in a mirror, so you can understand why she was chosen. It isn’t hard for me to see Baba now standing there in the d
ark, clutching the axe, grinning widely . . .

  She waited a minute, and then, from the closet, came a series of moans and shufflings that could easily have roused the adjoining township.

  Frankly, it’s a wonder they didn’t empty the family shotgun into Baba, because when someone finally got up the nerve to open that door—I believe it was my Uncle Double-G—there were Goddy-screeches that would have terrified any real lunatic. “Goddy!” they yelled, “Goddy! Goddy!”

  It all gave my grandmother immense satisfaction, however, and she never tired of telling the story.

  There was also another favorite little prank of hers. It was the day I accidentally broke off the blade of the bread knife. We managed to make it stand up on her chest so that the knife appeared to be imbedded almost to the hilt in her. Then I was commanded to rip her clothes a bit and empty a whole bottle of ketchup over her and the linoleum. Then she lay down and I ran screaming, “Somebody come quick! Somebody come quick!” It was gratifying that Aunt Dora fainted away completely, though the others saw through the joke at once.

  Baba was an extremely good woman by and large, I’ve decided. I never heard a cross word out of her. I never saw a beggar come to the door but that he went away with a full meal and frequently more—with the single exception of one old man who happened to have a dog with him. He wouldn’t leave the dog outside and Baba wouldn’t let it track up the house. She fretted for days about the man.

  But there was still that sense of humor.

  Observing my reading material at the time, she would say to me: “Now sonny, I’m old and one of these days I’ll be dead and gone. I’m just telling you so that when you feel a cold clammy hand on your forehead some night, just reach out and take it: it’ll be your old Baba, come to visit.” That put me in a sweat: I still can’t stand, to this day, wet rags on my brow.

  The oddest, most unsettling experience of my life took place a few nights after I’d finished painting the horrible heads on the bed.

  I had been reading The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar and the concluding bit about the mound of putrescence in the bed lingered long after the light had been put out. I kept trying to imagine it. The whole upper floor was deserted at this time, aside from myself and Baba’s room, Mr. Seay having been plucked from this mortal sphere two days earlier owing to sugar diabetes and his fondness for candy bars. The window was open. I was just dozing, thinking about putrescence, when there was this soft thud-thud as of someone advancing very slowly up the stairs. The tread was so slow, however, that I recognized it as Baba’s—she was going on eighty now. I waited, knowing what to expect. And I was partially correct. The footsteps got closer, I could hear my bedroom door opening; the thud-thud came across the room and someone sat down on the bed. I braced myself. It was Baba, of course, in a puckish mood. Shortly she would let out a blood-curdling scream or cackle like a witch, or worse. But—nothing happened. There was a heavy asthmatic sort of breathing in the room—I couldn’t see, as there was no moon—but nothing happened. Tentatively I nudged the weight on the bed with my foot: as nearly as this sort of test can tell, it was Baba all right. Minutes passed. And more minutes, the breathing regular as ever. Still nothing. No movement, no sign; only, the breathing got heavier and I could hear a kind of thumping, like a small animal hurling itself at a dead-skin drum.

  My mother came in and calmed me down. Questioned suspiciously, my grandmother denied having put a toe in my room all night.

  Now I realize what had happened. I’d no way of knowing then, however, and for years I told the story of the midnight ghost that sat on my bed.

  What had happened was, Baba had come to scare me and just plained worked herself into a heart attack from sheer excitement. No one must know about this, so she’d sat there waiting for the pain to pass.

  We all thought of Baba as several evolution-phases beyond being a mere human. Uncomplainingly and resolutely she had for years tended to the sick and dying of the house, but never once had she succumbed, actually, to a single germ. The rest of us might go about clutching our hearts or trembling or duplicating the death-agonies of whatever tenant: not Baba. And it finally got so that we believed she was immortal as George Bernard Shaw. We thought of the world with everybody in it dead but my grandmother and George Bernard Shaw, and them walking hand-in-hand among the littered corpses, seeing to proper burials and trying to make things nice for the departed. I don’t know what Mr. Shaw would have thought about that.

  There was a particular reason why I was unhappiest in the room right next to Baba’s. It was because she never let anyone, not even her own daughters, enter this room and I was continually overwhelmed with curiosity. Yet, I knew I must never violate the rule, for I had more than a suspicion it would make Baba sad—and most of us would have jumped in front of a locomotive before seeing that happen. Also, who knew? the room might have contained mementoes of past indiscretions, or she might have been hiding a mad sister there—for myself, I inclined to the latter view.

  Neither was correct, however, as it evolved.

  The truth was, Baba had a heart condition. And this was where she went whenever she felt an attack coming . . . In a way she sensed it was only her apparent immunity to Death and illness that allowed us to take the horror and the fear away, as we did. If we’d seen her sick even once, we were sure things would change; it would have become merely a big house where a lot of people died.

  Things did change when she had her stroke.

  Fortunately, no one else was dying at the time. Mr. Vaughn, the former town stationmaster, was bedridden, but this was more due to laziness than anything else: his groans, which had been filling the air, ceased abruptly when the news was out.

  Baba had been taking tea with Mr. Hannaford, the undertaker, and red-faced Dr. Cleveland who was in the habit of stopping by in between calls. It was morning. I knew she was feeling good, because she’d put a partially asphyxiated toad in my trousers pocket—to my terror, as I despised and mortally loathed toads and like creatures. I found it on my way to school. When I got home from school no auguries were in the air, except I noticed idly that the roses were in exceptionally fine bloom—the yellow ones particularly were everywhere. And the air was full of a natural sweetsyrup fragrance, unsuggestive of the slumber room.

  But things were powerfully quiet.

  My first thought was that Mr. Vaughn had died. But then I saw the old man seated on the back porch, holding his battered old felt hat in his hands and revolving it slowly by turning the brim. He looked far from happy. He stared at me.

  At first they wouldn’t let me see Baba. But I pleaded and bawled and finally they gave in and I went into the downstairs bedroom Aunt Nell used for her patients (she was a masseuse).

  I expected something hideous, judging from the way everybody was carrying on. A mound of putrescence in the bed would not have been unnerving: I was ready.

  But, aside from the fact that she was in bed where I’d never seen her before, Baba looked little different—except perhaps more beautiful than ever. Her hair had been taken down and combed against the pillow and it looked silver-soft even against the spotless Irish linen slip. Her face was lightly rouged and powdered and she wore a pastel blue shawl over her gingham gown. Her eyes were closed.

  I asked everyone else to please leave the room. Surprisingly, they did.

  Poor Baba, I thought. The stroke had come without warning; it had knocked her to the floor and when the doctor finally arrived, there was nothing to do. Her entire left side was paralyzed, for one thing. It had hurt her brain, for another. She would suffer a short time and then die . . .

  I looked at her, feeling as empty as I’d ever felt before; I knew I must say something, try to be of comfort in some way, difficult as it was.

  I walked to the bed and, gulping, touched her folded hands, as if to make this awful dream seem somehow real.

  Baba’s left eye opened. “Somebody,” she suddenly screamed, “come and help me! This young man is trying to feel of my b
osom!”

  My grandmother “suffered” for three years, which fact confounded medical science as represented by Dr. Cleveland and restored our faith in her immortality.

  She never got out of the bed, but few people have done more traveling than Baba did after her stroke. Mostly she returned to her birthplace in North Carolina, though frequently she would chronicle personal experiences with the wild savages of Montana and Utah. She spoke several authentic Indian dialects fluently, we knew that (though not where she picked the knowledge up) and for whole days running there would not be a word of English heard from her room. It was a fact that she’d never in her life been to Utah and visited Montana only once, to see William Hart’s statue—on second thought, that might have been Wyoming. Anyway, it was all a long time after the last wild savages disappeared.

  Once she spent a day calling out the sights of Chicago like a tourist guide: “Now this here is the famous Art Institute; to your right you see the Shedd Aquarium; over there is the Planetarium; we are now passing old Lake Michigan.” Of course, she’d never been there.

  Time took precedence over space in Baba’s travels: she was a different age every day. It wasn’t easy to keep up.

  “Get your damn hands off of me, Jess Randolph!” she yelled one night, waking the whole house. “I am entirely too young for these kind of monkeyshines.”

  Another night we were startled to hear: “The Great! Letty’s chopped her hand off with the axe!” This referred to the time my mother inprovidentially severed the third finger of her left hand whilst cutting up some kindling wood. Baba had held the finger on so tight that when Dr. Cleveland finally arrived it was possible to effect a mend-job. It had happened fifteen years before my birth.