“Nice painting,” I said to my companion. “Kind of spooky, don’t you think?” I looked at her for a reply to my patter, but no counter-patter was forthcoming. She simply stared at me as if I’d just told a joke she didn’t get.
“There’s not much down here,” she finally said. “Just a couple of hallways that don’t go anywhere and a bunch of rooms, most of them locked. If you want to see something spooky, go to the end of that hall and open the door on the right.”
I faithfully followed her instructions. On the door handle hung a rather large animal collar at the end of a chain leash. The chain jingled a little when I pushed open the door. The red light in the hallway barely allowed me to see inside, but there was little to see anyway except a small, empty room. Its floor was bare cement and there was straw laid down upon it. The smell was terrific.
“Well?” she asked when I returned down the hallway.
“It’s a start,” I answered, winking the subtlest possible wink. We just stood for a moment gazing at each other in a light the color of fresh meat. Then she led me back upstairs.
“Where did you say you’re from?” she asked as that noisy stairway amplified our footsteps into reverberant dungeonlike echoes.
“It’s a real small place,” I replied. “About a hundred miles outstate. It’s not even on the maps.”
“And you’ve never been to a place like this before?”
“Uh-uh, never.”
She stopped at the top of the stairs. “Then before we go any further,” she said, “I want to give you some advice and tell you to go back where you came from.”
I just looked at her, shaking my head slowly and insolently.
“Okay, then. Let’s go.”
We went.
And there was much to see on the way—a Punch and Judy panorama which was staged between the chasmical folds of a playhouse curtain of rich inky red, and getting redder every passing second. Each scene flipped by like a page in a storybook: that frozen stage where the players are stiffened with immortality and around which the only thing that stirs is the reader’s roving eye.
Locked doors were no obstacle.
Behind one, where every wall of the room was painted with heavy black bars from floor to ceiling, the Queen of the Singing Kingdom—riding crop raised high—sat atop her magic flying leopard, which unfortunately had been recently transformed into a human. And, sadly, the animal had lost one of its paws. What good fortune that it could still fly! But did it want to? Or did it prefer to lumber lamely around its cage, with the Queen herself growing out of its back like a Siamese twin, her royal blood and his beast’s now flowing together, tributaries from distant worlds mingling in a hybrid harmony. The animal was so pleased that it yowled a tune as the Queen beat time upon its flanks with her stinging crop. Sing, leopard, sing!
Behind another door, one with a swastika splashed negligently on its front in such a way that the paint had dripped from every appendage of the spidery symbol, was a scene similar to the previous. Inside, some colored lights were angled down upon the floor, where a very small man, his hunchback possibly artificial, knelt with head bowed low. His hands were lost in a pair of enormous gloves with shapeless fingers which lolled around like ten drunken jacks-in-the-box. One of the numb fingers was trapped beneath the pointy toe at the base of a lofty boot. See the funny clown! Or rather jester in a jingly cap. His ringed eyes patiently gazed upwards into the darkness, attentive to the hollow voice hurling anger from on high. The voice was playing up the moral disparity between its proudly booted self and that humiliated freak upon the floor, contrasting its warrior’s leaping delights with the fool’s dragging sack of amusements. But couldn’t the stooping hunchback’s fun be beautiful too? his eyes whispered with their elliptical mouths. But couldn’t—Silence! Now the little monkey was going to get it.
Behind still another door, which had no distinguishing marks, a single candle glowed through red glass, just barely keeping the room out of total blackness. It was hard to tell how many were in there, more than a couple, less than a horde. They were all wearing the same gear, little zippers and big zippers like silver stitches scarring their outfits. One very little one had an eyelash caught in it, I could tell that much. For the rest of it, they might as well have been human shadows that merged softly with one another, proclaiming threats of ultimate mayhem and wielding oversized straight razors. But although these gleaming blades were always potently poised, they never came down. It was only make-believe, just like everything else I had seen.
The next door, and for me the last, was at the end of an exhausting climb in what must have been a tower.
“Here’s where you get your money’s worth, mister,” said my date, blind to the signs of apprehension—clutching my coat, lightly pawing my cheek—I was beginning to exhibit like an insecure artist about to reveal his unseen canvasses.
“Show me the worst,” I said, eyeing the undersized door before us.
The situation here was as transparent as the others. Only this time it wasn’t pet leopards, pathetic clowns, or paranoid shadows. It was, in fact, two new characters: a wicked witch and her assistant in the form of an enchanted puppet. The clumsy little creature, due to an incorrigibly mischievous temperament, had behaved badly. Now the witch was in the process, which she had down to perfection, of putting him back in line. She swept across the room, her dark dress swirling like a maelstrom, her hideous face sunken into an abundant hood. Behind her a stained-glass window shone with all the excommunicated tints of corruption. By the light of this infernal rainbow of wrinkled cellophane, she collared her naughty assistant and chained him hands and feet to a formidable-looking stone wall, which buckled aluminum-like when he collapsed against it. She angled down her hooded face and whispered into his wooden ear.
“Do you know what I do with little puppets who’ve been bad?” she inquired. “Do you?”
The puppet trembled a bit and would have beamed bright with perspiration had he been made of flesh and not wood.
“I’ll tell you what I do,” the witch continued half-sweetly. “I make them touch the fire. I burn them from the legs up.”
Then, surprisingly, the puppet smiled.
“And what will you do,” the puppet asked, “with all those old dresses, gloves, veils, and capes when I’m gone? What will you do in your low-rent castle with no one to stare, his brow of glittering silver, into the windows of your dreams?”
Perhaps the puppet was perspiring after all, for his brow was now glistening with tiny flecks of starlight.
The witch stepped back and whipped off her black hood, exposing blond hair beneath it. She wanted to know how I knew about all that stuff, which she had never revealed to anyone. She accused me of peeping-tomism, of breaking and entering, and of illicit curiosity in general.
“Let me out of these chains and I’ll tell you all about myself,” I shouted.
“Forget it,” she answered. “I’m going to get someone to throw you out of here.”
“Then I’ll just have to release myself,” I said more calmly.
The manacles opened around my ankles, my wrists, and the chains fell away.
“You can’t pretend,” I continued as I approached her, “that there isn’t something familiar about me. After all we’ve meant to each other, after all we’ve done together, over and over and over. You’re not bored, are you? I hate to think what that would mean…for both of us. You’ve been cooped up here in this silly place too long. For someone like you, that can be deadly. You’ve always known you were special, haven’t you? That someday—and it was always just around the corner, wasn’t it?—great things were going to happen, great things that didn’t quite have a name yet. But they were there, as real as the velvet embrace of your favorite cape, the one with the silver chain that draws its curtainy wings together at your bosom. As real as the tall candles you love to light during storms, and which you drunkenly knocked over once, burning your right hand. No, don’t cover up the scar, I’m sure no one�
�s noticed it before now. You love those storms, don’t you, with their chains of raindrops whipping against your windows. All that craving for noise and persecution. All that beautiful craziness! The storms: your eyes stared into their eyes, and into mine.
“But now you’re in danger of losing all that, which is why I showed up tonight. You’ve got to get out of this tinsellated sideshow. This is for hicks, this is small time. You can do better than this. I can take you places where the stories of tortuous romance and the storms never end. I’ll take you there. Please, don’t back away from me. There’s nowhere to go and your eyes tell me you want the same things I do. If you’re worried about the hardships of traveling to strange faraway places, don’t! You’re almost there now. Just fall into my arms, into my heart, into—There, that was easy, wasn’t it?”
Afterward I retraced my steps down stairways and through corridors of scarlet darkness. “Goodnight, everybody!” I said to the girls in the reception room. Back out on the street, I paused and looked at that peculiar door again. I could now see the logic of doing away with gratuitous barriers between one place and another, between those on the outside and those within. Bring down the walls! But watch out for escapees.
Actually she made only a single attempt. It wasn’t serious, though. A drunk I passed on the sidewalk saw an arm shoot out at him from underneath my shirt, projecting chest-high at a perfect right angle to the rest of me. He staggered over, shook the hand with a jolly vigor, and then proceeded on his way. And I proceeded on mine, once I’d got her safely back inside her fabulous prison, a happy captive of my heart. We fled down the sidewalk. We breathed the cold of that winter night. We were one forever.
At the corner the amber traffic light had finally burst into a glorious red as my old flame and I approached the ultimate intersection of our flesh…as well as our dreams.
THE CHRISTMAS EVES OF AUNT ELISE:
A TALE OF POSSESSION IN OLD GROSSE POINTE
We pronounced her name with a distinct “Z” sound—Remember, Jack, remember—the way some people slur Missus into Mizzuz or for Christmas say Chrizmuzz. It was at her remarkable home in Grosse Pointe that she insisted our family, both its wealthy and its unwealthy side, celebrate each Christmas Eve in a style that exuded the traditional, the old-fashioned, the antique. Actually, Aunt Elise constituted the wealthy side of the family all on her own. Her husband had died many years before, leaving his wife with a prosperous real estate business but no children. Not surprisingly, Aunt Elise undertook the ownership and management of the firm with phenomenal success, perpetuating our heirless uncle’s family name on for-sale signs planted in front lawns all over the state. But what was Uncle’s first name, a young nephew or niece sometimes wondered. Or, as it was more than once put by one of us children: “Where’s Uncle Elise?” To which the rest of us answered in unison: “He’s at his ease,” a response we learned from none other than our widowed aunt herself.
Aunt Elise was without husband or offspring of her own, true enough. But she loved all the ferment of big families, and every holiday season she possessed as much in relations both young and no longer young as she did in her real estate returns, her tangible and intangible assets and investments, and her abundant hard cash. Her house was something of an Elizabethan country manor in style while remaining modest, even relatively miniature, in scale. It fit very nicely—when it existed—into a claustrophobic cluster of trees on some corner acreage a few steps uphill from Lake Shore Drive, profiling rather than facing the lake itself. A rather dull exterior of soot-gray stones somewhat camouflaged the old place in its woodland hideaway; until one caught sight of its diamond-paned windows—kept brilliant by the personal attention of Aunt Elise herself, no less—and one realized that a house in fact existed where before there seemed to be only shadowed emptiness.
Around Christmastime these many-faceted windows took on a candied glaze in the pink, blue, green, and other-colored lights strung about their perimeters. More often in the old days—Remember them, Jack—a thick December fog rolled off the not-yet-frozen lake and those kaleidoscopic windows would throw their spectrums into the softening mist. This, to my child’s senses, was the image and atmosphere defining the winter holiday: a serene congregation of colors whose confused murmurings divulged to this world rumors of strange and solemn services that were concurrently taking place in another. This was the celebration, this the festival. Why did we leave it all behind us, leave it outside? And as I was guided up the winding front walk toward the house, a parent’s hand in either of mine, I always stopped short, pulling Mom and Dad back like a couple of runaway horses, and for a brief, futile moment refused to go inside.
After my first Christmas—chronologically my fifth—I knew what happened inside the house, and year after year there was little change either in the substance or surface details of the program. For those from large families, this scene is a little too familiar to bother describing. Perhaps even lifelong orphans are jaded to it. Still, there are others to whom depictions of the unusual uncles, the loveable grandparents, and the common run of cousins will always be fresh and dear; those who delight in multiple generations of characters crowding the page, who are warmed by the feel of their paper flesh. I tell you they share these desires with my Aunt Elise, and her spirit is in them.
She always occupied and dominated, for the duration of these Christmas Eves, the main room of her house. This room I never saw except as a fantasy of ornamentation, an hallucinatorium in holiday dress. Right now I can only hope to portray a few of its highlights. First of all holly, both fresh and artificial, hung down the walls from wherever it was possible to hang—from the frames of paintings, from the stained-wood shelves of a thousand gewgaws, even from the velvety embossed pattern of the wallpaper itself, intertwining with its vegetable swirls and flourishes, if my memory sees this accurately. And from fixtures above, including a chandelier delicately sugared with tiny Italian lights, down came gardens of mistletoe in mid-air. The huge fireplace blazed with a festive inferno, and before its cinder-spitting hearth was a protective screen, at either end of which stood a pair of thick brass posts; and over the crown of each post—whose shape and design I never glimpsed—were two puppet Santas, slipped on like socks and drooping a little to one side, their mittens outstretched in readiness to give someone a tiny, angular hug. In a corner, the one beside the front window, a sturdy evergreen was somewhere hidden beneath every imaginable type of dangling, roping, or blinking decoration, as well as being dolled up with ridiculous satin bows in pastel shades, lovingly tied by human hands. The same hands did their work on the presents beneath the tree, and year after year these seemed, like everything else in the room, to be in exactly the same place, as if the gifts of last Christmas had never been opened, quickening in me the nightmarish sense of a ritual forever reenacted without hope of escape. (Somehow I am still possessed by this same feeling of entrapment, and after all these years.) My own present was always at the back of that horde of packages, almost against the wall behind the tree. It was tied up with a pale purple ribbon and covered with pale blue wrapping paper upon which little bears in infants’ sleeping gowns dreamed of more pale blue presents which, instead of more bears, had little boys dreaming upon them. I spent much of a given Christmas Eve sitting near this gift of mine, mostly to find refuge from the others rather than to wonder at the thing inside. It was always something in the way of underwear, nightwear, or socks, never the nameless marvel which I fervently hoped to receive from my obscenely well-heeled aunt. Nobody seemed to mind that I sat on the other side of the room from where most of them congregated to talk or sing carols to the music of an ancient organ, which Aunt Elise played with her back to her audience, and to me.
Slee—eep in heav—enly peace.
“That was very good,” she said without turning around. As usual the sound of her voice led you to expect that any moment she would clear her throat of some sticky stuff which was clinging to its insides. Instead she switched off the electric organ,
after which gesture some of the gathering, dismissed, left for other parts of the house.
“We didn’t hear Old Jack singing with us,” she said, turning to look across the room where I was seated in a large chair beside a fogged window. On that occasion I was about twenty or twenty-one, home from school for Christmas. I had drunk quite a bit of Aunt Elise’s holiday punch, and felt like answering: “Who cares if you didn’t hear Old Jack singing, you old bat?” But instead I simply stared her way, drunkenly taking in her features, with prejudice, for the family scrapbook of my memory: tight-haired head (like combed wires), calm eyes of someone in an old portrait (someone long gone), high cheekbones highly colored (less rosily than like a rash), and the prominent choppers of a horse charging out of nowhere in a dream. I had no worry about my future ability to recall these features, even though I had secretly vowed this would be the last Christmas Eve I would view them. So I could afford to be tranquil in the face of Aunt Elise’s taunts that evening. Anyway, further confrontation between the two of us was aborted when some of the children began clamoring for one of their aunt’s stories. “And this time a true story, Auntie. One that really happened.”
“All right,” she answered, adding that “maybe Old Jack would like to come over and sit with us.”
“Too old for that, thank you. Besides, I can hear you just fine from—” “Well,” she began before I’d finished, “let me think a moment. There are so many, so many. Anyhow, here’s one of them. This happened before any of you were born, a few winters after I moved into this neighborhood with your uncle. I don’t know if you ever noticed, but a little ways down the street there’s an empty lot where there should be, used to be, a house. You can see it from the front window over there,” she said, pointing to the window beside my chair. I let my eyes follow her finger out that window and, through the fog, I witnessed the empty lot of her story.
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