CHAPTER 19
“Dies irae, dies illa…”
The words softly careened through, up and down and in and out of his brain all day, the day of the burial. Not just of his father, now he an orphan, mother dead on his thirteenth birthday—a rhythm of birthing and dying which was not yet imprinted upon his being, just markers in memory’s recall: dates…this day: the Latin phrase—he himself had sung, intoned this dirge often, serving, as was his calling: Sister Clementine pointing at him—no words, just the finger...he knowing it as God’s Finger...so he had come, joined the select few, chosen to be servers: altar-boys…Sacrifice he knew it all as, whether it was a Daily Mass with bloodless bread and wine or a Wedding Feast with the submission: surrender of body and soul, or the Solemn Funeral with the “offering of one’s life” as Father Doom—actually, Dombrowski, but his penchant for officiating at just about every funeral at Saint Vincent’s got it shortened to “Doom”…all was Sacrifice...gazing up at The Crucified One, not lost on Frank that it was a Crucified Son—today, he: Crucified Son.
“Days of wrath and doom impending…”
The house was now his. “Mine” seemed such a constricted word; a grave word—watching the dirt fall upon his father’s coffin, knowing the grave as “mine”—his to visit...his only to visit, he being the only visitor: ancestral, scion—he felt coffined.
“Man, have a toke!”
Jack, totally stoned out of his mind on some potent grass, didn’t have to offer him some weed, for the elixir of Mary Jane was all in the air. Wherever Jack went O2 was never the same: nothing pure about the air...all transformed into magical smoke. Dominion.
Jack floats within a world of hallucinating fog.
Jack’s—a world whose shores are known to Frank, but one more of a certain fascination, for Jack was one who could read his mind—no, not my mind, my soul—be able to hang around that space Frank knew as “mine”—hang there and be within it, enlarging it a mite by his just being there. Frank liked this—he didn’t especially like Jack...it was more a matter of comfort than of liking. Whatever.
Jack—grad school drop-out: “Engineering, Man. Who needs more bridges?” with the requisite long-hair, scraggly beard, and gold-rimmed glasses of the shiftless but fuck-a-lot: anyone, anything! Hippies...for Frank, Jack’s a puny dude who probably never played high school ball, just a screw-off if not screw-up...not as Frank saw himself—mature by reason of death, stable by reason of home ownership, working for a living, a bit adrift in his heart but a solid guy...above average in everything—height, looks, smarts: played two years of college baseball, could’ve been a competitive swimmer…but the fucking War and the fucking Draft and the fucking Establishment—“Shit, the goddam fucking times!”
Dylan the Prophet—“Everybody must get stoned!”
Frank sprawls on the floor ignoring Jack...sucks a long ash; his face reddens. He is no longer alone...not because of Jack, but just being beside himself—yet still lonely.
Frank was the only one their age who owned a home. Not just an apartment or a condo, but a bona fide house. “’Cause his parents tripped out, get it?” Frank once overheard Jack’s explanation. It cemented his deep dislike of him.
House—foreboding, rising like a medieval Rhineland fortress, multi-turreted, Victorian cross-breed, of Nietzchean Sturm und Drang threatening: three cataclysmic stories and a chthonic basement...more monument that abode—a frightened response to the forgetfulness desired by the immigrant, a darkly proper response to the depthlessness of the prairie so brightly, brazenly menacing the pioneer.
Third floor, northwest turret: Jack was a frequent visitor. Stayed over too many nights. Stargazer.
But Jack understood. “Dumb motherfucker!” Frank always scalded him when stoned; more drunk than smoked. It made Jack laugh; dope laughter, with tears and an urgency to visit the fridge and steal whatever was there. “Munchies!” Jack’s ubiquitous comment whenever he touched anything, “Anything. Motherfucker, you’d eat anything.” And so Jack did. Frank rarely had leftovers.
“What ya need, Man,” toke and chomp, “is a broad ‘round here.” Flipping fragments of agricultural debris hither and thither. Only Frank cleaned up, but it took time for him to get pissed...being wasted fended off getting pissed.
“Yeah.” But not an affirmative. Rather, ridicule. Meaning, “Like I need someone in my life!”
Frank was too stupefied to psychoanalyze his orphan-hood. Only Son.
“Days of…” and both are sleeping. The Moody Blues got stuck on The Dark Side of the Moon. Frank replaces needles on his stereo about once a month.
But it was a thought, one that came into his waking time as a thought which had been thought before, patriarchal inheritance: his father having considered it himself—the tenth anniversary after his mother died—that he should be dating. “Frank, you’re now on your own. Maybe I should ask your heavenly mother?”
It went like that. Cause and Effect. His father ever the logician. Finding Beginnings and Ends. Why he was such a Good Catholic. Especially during these years of ecclesiastical upheaval—“Went to a funeral last week—old man Myers—can you believe it? It was in English!”
It was his “maybe.” Frank knew that it was fraught with fear: Perdition! As if his mother’s permission—and only it—would free him to have sex, ever again. Frank knew that his father would never say, “Sex.” Probably had never even uttered it to his mother. But that is what “maybe” was about. He needed a Dispensation. Some Permission to Proceed. A Pardon. Free Sex?
His dad was still granting his departed spouse full control over “married sex”—which had meant and could only mean “having children”—for him to enter into a new marriage: Horrors! Sex without the possibility of children: “Bless me Father for I have sinned.”
Frank witnessed it in a dream—Mother’s hand parting the clouds and signing from horizon to heaven—signing upon the clouds, granting him Absolution. “Better to marry than burn.” In his dream, his mother was wise and compassionate.
But then, soon after, his father abruptly died. Massive stroke. Maybe it was his mother’s sign? Frank had half-forgotten the dream. Maybe her spousal action from beyond the grave. She who was, surely, bending God’s Ear, dispensing Divine Justice: Avenging?
Maybe.
Frank has never missed his mother. “Don’t you miss her, terribly?!” asked sentimentally at the grave as he placed her anniversary flowers: her half-sister—Aunt Magdalene, she crying, profusely and with true feeling. At this moment Frank realizes that he has never missed his mother. “Missed” in a sense of target shooting, yeah, but “missed” as if his life had a missing piece? Or, that he was wounded in battle and missed his amputated limb? What?
“I miss her.” Almost beneath his breath, but sufficient to assuage his Aunt.
From this visit forward, he always brings potted flowers: Offerings.
“You must miss your Mom.”
She was a great fuck, so he tried not to appear annoyed.
“Gee, she was pretty.”
You fucking bitch, put that down! But all he uttered was a bland, “Yeah.”
When the chick leaves the bedroom, Frank removes the two pictures: one off the wall, one off his dresser...stashes them on a shelf inside his clothes closet.
As he walks down the stairway, on his way to the kitchen and breakfast, she throws back at him, “Got to get. Can’t miss work!” The sweet-thing is juggling hat and coat, leaving without eating or snatching anything, not even an apple...but let’s face it: not a chick ...she had stayed over only once before…only the third girl ever to stay the night, none had repeated, none, except now—her name had that queer energy in it, as if “Bertha” meant “Except now. Except me.” Bertha being such an unusual name. Instantly popping up images of a big ship docking at ocean’s wharf: a cruise liner or a battleship. Or, of some big fat cow bellowing, moaning Jolly Green Giant valley moos! Definitely of something massive�
�the sound of it “Ber-tha” had massiveness about it…but it was just the opposite, not as to energy but as to her petite frame.
Bertha O’Brien.
When she first said it, pulled out her full name, Frank just chuckled...the old German-Irish poke in the backseat of the car...his father, himself, German and his mother, Irish, always the joke about “the backseat,” although it was clear from the laughter that it was a joke not in touch with an actual event, merely just a joke reaching for a higher truth: here, that God’s Ways were so Mysterious, Baffling (Vengeful!) that he mated the Fiery Irish Demonness with the Blockhead Kraut Dumpkopf, both unredeemed pagans, joined in Catholic Marriage for the Betterment of Their Own Souls and for the Manifestation of God’s Eternal Justice...“BOB” he almost called her—this nickname never coming back into play, neither as joke or tag for there was no humor in Bertha’s looks—she was not a looker, passably average, a face a bit too squinched, a profile only lascivious at the bar’s lecherous Last Call...many, like Frank, had often just walked past her, however…Bertha O’Brien was everything her name wasn’t: a flash-quick smile, quicker wit, quickest kisser: wicked teaser—like a flickering flame upon a candle she whooshed in and lit Frank’s, um, wick…“Wickedness,” is how he muses upon her now beguiling face: chimera—recalls her presence...catches himself relishing the word, her sound: Bertha…but it was her dance...Bertha as lithe and cavorting and sensuous as her name denied, she was a flame undulating with the slightest of movements generating heat: a wax melter...Frank was wax-with-bee-buzzing desire—she made every inhibition he ever had melt...all the strictures and handcuffs and cock chains of his Catholic education—Mothers of Heavenly Sorrow in grammar school; knuckled beatings in Jesuit high school—his body bore the astral slaps, bruises and just desserts of soul saving education: “Educate the soul, not the mind!” bellowed Father O’Malley, S.J....Frank, wax upon the high altar, pure, virgin, he had stretched on tippy toes many times to light the devilish but sacred wick as it ignored, avoided, eluded his blazing taper...dripping, Vitalis grooming acid, leaking, slipping stinging beads upon his callow forehead, into his eyes, he, a river of putrefying sweat under his cassock and surplus—now, Bertha the licking flame and he the consummable wick!
The very first time Bertha came into the house it jolted a sensate change: deep and profound, as if the joints were yawing—a deep belly sound, growling, but with a cackling—he instinctively looked towards the ceiling to see if it was splitting…now, he re-runs her entry and observes the transformation of his home...into a House of Wickedness.
Bertha not Jack made Frank so hallucinate—not needing smoke, not needing drink—doing a bit of each, but just needing each other. Frank looks at her: a mere gaze, a sentinel’s careful observation of detail—Bertha closing the door behind her…he is not alone: not beside himself, not merely with some else, but here, in the house.
Mine. Bertha and the house. Mine.
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