It was a star of night, without beauty or brightness, leading her on into a deeper darkness, without Virgo, Libra, or Sagittarius.
“P-P-Papa …”
Papa was not to be disturbed. This was known as firmly as if he had hung a sign on the doorknob outside the room, like a guest in an hotel, and yet Alice knocked on the door. It was not a tentative tap, but a firm well-knuckled rap; he was a man who had ordered that he should be awoken for an important appointment at a certain time.
She did not call his name again.
The feast of Stephen.
She looked behind her, trying to make out the figure of a page – small, bowed over – placing his feet in her footprints, and following behind her, laden with flesh, wine, and pine logs. Sire, the night is darker now,/And the wind grows stronger;/Fails my heart I know not how;/I can go no longer.
… Westward leading, still proceeding,
Guide us to thy perfect light …
The figures on the terra-cotta panel were not representations of the Three Weird Sisters facing Macbeth. They were of herself, Allegra, and Edith, singing their carol to Papa. They were herself, Charlotte, and Mary Benedict, singing to Reynolds Templeton Seabright. They were herself, Annie, and Annie’s child, Desiderata – not Joshua; she knew the child would be a girl – singing to …
Singing to …
Singing …
When she pushed the door, it resisted, something pushing against it from the other side. She was pushing it backward through a drift of snow, still loose and lightly packed, so that – with slight pressure – it opened into the study with a crunching sound, slowly and more slowly as it compacted the snow behind it. As it opened, looser snow gusted out like a blizzard inside the house, and her night light was blown out. In the smoky, flaring light of a windblown gaslight, her nightgown snapped out behind her in an icy blast, she took her first steps inside the snow-filled room. Sleety drizzle drenched her hair and the front of her nightgown, gathering in her eyebrows and eyelashes, blurring all she saw, and scraps of torn paper blew into her and stuck to her cheeks and clothes, like confetti at a wind-blasted wedding. The light suspended from the ceiling swung, hissing, like that of a ship on a stormy sea, and she saw what she saw like someone blinking, darkness and brightness in rapidly flickering succession. There seemed to be more darkness than brightness, and what she saw she saw in glimpses, hurtling past lighted upper windows on the elevated railroad at night. She closed the door behind her, pushing it back without turning around, and the wind blowing through the room eased. Snow, not fire, filled the grate – the fire had long since died – and snow had drifted in through the open window – the upper sash of the left-hand window was almost fully lowered – to accumulate everywhere.
What she saw was somehow remote, far away from her, and yet the detail was intense.
It was a dark subterranean room beneath the level of the snow, like a room cut into ice, as she had once imagined Annie’s room. The windows were almost totally blocked by a snowdrift, stifling the sound and power of the wind, or the door would otherwise have been slammed back. The drift continued down into the room through the opened window, a continuous smooth slope, half burying the desk, down onto and across the floor. In the top left-hand corner of the left-hand window, a little gap – the only part not yet blocked – was funneling more snow through, but all that could be seen through the panes – they were a multiplicity of small dark-backed mirrors – was the deep, windblown, layered snow. The heavy velvet tobacco-smelling drapes of the open window had fallen, or been pulled down, and the brass pole lay at an angle, projecting from the snow, as if hurled there. Snow was everywhere, incongruously heaped upon everyday domestic objects, and she felt like a survivor after an avalanche, trapped in the ruins of her home, listening for rescuers, distant, muffled voices calling her name.
“I’m here!” she should be calling, to guide them to her. “I’m here!”
She had no thoughts of what had happened, the how or why of it, the bitter cold of outside breaking through into the inside, like the strange reversals that occurred when carefully decorated inner walls – walls for displaying pictures and photographs in quiet rooms – were exposed to the elements during the demolition of a building. Forgotten drapes flapped from broken windows, and rain-drenched wallpaper hung down in strips. Her house had collapsed around her, and she was walking through snow. The books, the shelves, were buried under snow; snow covered the carpet, the chairs against the wall, the cigar lighter, the inkstand, and papers. What had once been there was hidden from view, and only her memory made her see it now. There was nothing but the snow, a continuous, untrodden swathe of smooth snow that swept in an unbroken arc from Hudson Heights, through the orchards, through the house, across the room, through the window, across the street, and down Chestnut Hill. The globes of the unlit wall lamps were filled with snow, and the photograph of the office on South Street had a miniature drift of snow across its lower half. An out-of-season storm had invaded that sunlit summer scene. Papers slapped wetly from the mantel and shelves, and were stuck at angles where they had been blown in crumpled layers against the glass of the mirror, the pictures, the windows, like fly sheets advertising cheap goods pasted to the dark exterior of a failed business. They were startlingly white in the dim underground light. Around them, and everywhere in the room, were fragments of torn paper. Papa had made his own artificial snowstorm in the room before the real snow started, tearing up page after page, ripping them up small so that no word should be legible, and throwing the pieces high into the air, so that a blizzard whirled around in the wind through the open window.
She was treading blood into the whiteness as she moved forward. She looked down and saw this. Her bare right foot had stepped through the torn wet paper and the snow into the broken glass of a smashed bottle. She couldn’t feel this – her feet were numbed – but she saw the blood.
All these thoughts, these impressions, happened in moments.
All she was aware of was of opening the door, stepping into the room, and seeing her father towering above her, over her, half buried in snow and paper, his swivel chair on top of his desk, as if he had placed it there in preparation for hanging himself, ready to leap out into space.
The chair had swung right round so that he was facing her, and what she saw was a tableau – a tableau vivant in which nothing was living – silent, motionless, a Mrs. Jarley’s Waxworks where the spirit of Madame Tussaud – there was another Madame – was at its strongest. On one side of the desk, the four drawers had been pulled out from top to bottom – a little further out each time – so that they formed a set of library stairs from the floor to the desktop. It was like an ascent to a guillotine where he could do a far, far better thing than he had ever done, even if he would not find a far, far better rest. A Tale of Two Cities! She had been the first to guess what the tableau was representing, and had won the game.
The accompanying music – she heard it distinctly; Miss Iandoli, recklessly throwing her windows open in the blizzard, was playing the piano transcription – was not from an opera this time, though the fourth movement, the most significant one, had been filched from an opera. It was the music from a symphony, the Symphonie fantastique, “Episodes in the Life of an Artist.” Berlioz had, with sympathetic appropriateness for the subject, the two featured cities – Paris et Londres (Paris and London) – named the five movements in French, and helpfully translated these names – whisperingly enclosed in brackets – into English.
1.Rêveries, passions (Daydreams, Passions).
2. Un bal (A Ball).
3. Scène aux champs (In the Fields) …
He had not hanged himself.
He had …
He had cut his throat, and there was
(STAB EVIL SINNER!)
far more blood than the blood from her foot.
(La Maison de Dieu (The Tower Struck by Lightning).
(L’Amoureux (The Lovers).
(Le Bateleur (The Magician).
>
(Le Soleil (The Sun).
(La Lune (The Moon).
(L’Etoile (The Star) …)
The snow had poured in upon him, piling up across his shoulders and tumbling down, and his blood had poured down his chest and stomach, accumulated in his lap, mingling with the heaped snow, and down his legs, across the desk, and down to the floor toward where she was standing. All the red ink from all those torn sheets of papers, all the redness from all those columns of scribbled and slashed-out figures, all that infinity of years of numbering, profit and loss, had burst out from within him into a single mass of darkly clotted gleaming blackened scarlet. She pulled away some of the confetti-sized pieces of wet paper stuck to her face, looking at what was written on them, a woman searching for something to read to pass the time. Faintly, she recollected reaching up and catching fragments of burned paper as the Shakespeare Castle fell in ruins, and smoke billowed around her. The sun/Has turn’d to ice! – There is a haze in the sky,/Chilly and thick, that ne’er will clear away!/The earth is wither’d grass, leaves, flowers, and all! The torn paper was all covered with handwritten figures in columns, and the red ink stained her hands. Her face, also, would be streaked with smudged redness, and dabbed with an excess of scarlet-smeared white beauty spots, like the face of an unskilled boy who had overambitiously attempted to shave away a nonexistent beard.
4.Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold).
It was a rapid march she heard. He was hastening toward his execution; he was leaping into space, eager to be dead, or being pushed forward from behind, through the study, up the four steps, onto the top of the desk, struggling to free himself, but overpowered.
She moved forward for a close look, her head leaning back to see.
His head had fallen back, something severed and gazing up at the ceiling from a drenched basket, and the great gash in his throat grinned at her like a huge red-lipped mouth. His frozen beard, blood seeping pinkly through the ice, stuck vertically upward like wild, surprised hair above the dripping lips. He looked like King Lear, fantastically dressed with wild flowers.
“I will die bravely,” he should be saying, “like a smug bridegroom. What! I will be jovial.”
(“I never expected this to happen!” the grinning mouth was exclaiming, giggling. “How astonishing!”)
“O my dear father!” she should be saying, kissing those lips. “No cause,” she should be saying, “no cause,” and weeping.
(She said nothing – nothing came of nothing – and tears were frozen inside her. Attempts to weep would damage her eyes, rupture her tear ducts. Even then, she was experiencing Difficulties With Tears, had been having difficulties for years.)
Blood soaked through the full depth of the half-melted layer of ice and snow, the color of pale, water-soaked raspberries. A refreshing fruit sorbet cleanses the palate between the courses of a rich meal, enabling one’s guests to appreciate the subtle, delicate flavors with more discernment.
Yum-yum, say they.
(STAB EVIL SINNER.)
The idée fixe – so much more satisfying a term than leitmotiv, so much more psychological – was insistently emphasized each time it appeared, guiding her toward the correct answer. Think of something French! Something French! The guillotine blade glinted, fell.
THWUNK!
5.Songe d’une nuit du Sabbat (A Witches’ Sabbath).
Fair is foul, and foul is fair.
Ay, sir, all this is so.
His head was angled back toward the open window behind him, like the head of someone trapped inside a structure filling with icy water, not snow, and straining for the only remaining source of air, opening his mouth wide to suck. His arms, like those frozen in mid-gesture by rigor mortis, seemed to be held out yearningly behind him, reaching for something beyond his reach, the swimmer in rising water. He appeared to be filling his lungs before a plunge into the depths of dark water, sucking the air desperately into his mouth. He was as wet as someone who had plunged repeatedly, searching for something over and over again, scrabbling to find what he wanted, trying to identify it by the sense of touch alone, unable to see, a broken-nailed pearl fisher tearing at the oyster shells with bruised hands. Something about his posture made her see him as Lockwood or Heathcliff, his hands moving past a window ledge covered with names scratched into the paint – the same names repeatedly, like the pages of old schoolbooks filled with hour upon hour of handwriting exercises – breaking through the glass of the casement to snatch at the hand of a lost, sobbing child outside in the snow. “Let me in – let me in!” the child begged. He was reaching blindly back, his hands over his shoulders. He would pull the child’s wrist – the child was “it,” not “her” – onto the broken pane, and rub it to and fro till the blood ran down.
“Who are you?” Lockwood asked frantically, as the small ice-cold hand clung on to his.
“It’s twenty years,” mourned the child’s voice, “twenty years, I’ve been a waif for twenty years!” There was her face, reflected in the dark interior of the window, looking in from outside. Twenty years. Her whole life. If she spoke, she would speak with the voice of a child; she would gurgle with the sound of a child not yet able to speak coherently.
She’d be like Archer Italiaander, Junior, summoned back from the realms of the dead to greet his mama.
“Mama,” she’d be saying. “Mama.”
Archer Italiaander, Junior, was very young for speech, even for the speaking of a single word. You imagined him as Archer Italiaander (Junior), the “Junior” enclosed in brackets like something whispered and suppressed, barely audible. His mother insisted that this was the word she had heard him speak. Quite distinctly. More than once. He’d looked at her as he said it.
“Mama.”
“I’m very surprised to be dead,” Papa would say, with a note of dissatisfaction. He never demonstrated an emotion, but always identified the one he purported to be experiencing. “I’m very angry indeed,” he would say, in that same calm, unraised voice, as if he were casually remarking, “Pleasant weather for the time of year,” or, “Rather cooler than yesterday.” “I’m happy,” that’s what he would have said in order to alert observers to the presence of happiness, had he ever been happy. It was not an expression he had, in fact, ever been known to use, but he would have spoken it in that same cool tone of voice, a voice tentatively attempting to give a name to something faintly recollected from long ago.
The piles of books in front of the window moved; thrusting forward, as if a character in a novel were bursting through into real life.
She moved forward like a Madame Defarge – yet another Madame – hastening for a closer look, click-click-clicking with her knitting needles, careful not to drop a stitch, using her time constructively – not wasting a moment – to shape warm garments in the icy coldness as the tumbrels rolled. Click, click, click: the knitting needles were the sound of iced-over twigs rattling together in a storm. If it wasn’t stitch-stitch-stitch, it was click-click-click.
She couldn’t see his face, but snow would be filling the open eyes, the open mouth, the nostrils, the seashell convolutions of the ears, layered across the miniature landscape of the pale face, Madame Tussaud forming wax around the dead features to make a death mask. The blind white faces of the dead were all around her in Carlo Fiorelli’s workshop. She heard the ripping of the cloth for the life cast, all the fabrics in the room being torn up like the papers, removing everything that was soft or comforting. She should close her eyes, not move, breathe slowly, as the layers were constructed upon her face; the muted splashing sound as Mama dabbed her face, soothing away pain.
When a horseman passes, the soldiers have a rule …
Her heavy-laden face was pulled downward, fixed in one place, incapable of expression. Her mouth was covered, her ears; she could not speak, could not hear.
But another pleasure enchantinger than these …
Marche au supplice (March to the Scaffold) began to play again, louder, faster, enthusiastic
crowds encoring the orchestra, as an opera rapidly approached its great, climactic death scene. It was strange to know the endings in opera and in Shakespeare, to watch the characters, and wait for the deaths of those who were going to die. From the time that they appeared, you knew that they would die, and every word they sang or spoke drew them closer to that moment.
Papa was slumped back, exhausted, after his death, after the demanding final aria at the end of a long night of singing. He had sung of his approach to death, of his crossing through the dark borderlands into silence, and the crowds applauded his dying, and the manner of his death. In the moonlight, he had invited the statue of the man he had murdered to a banquet, and the statue had appeared. The cold of an Arctic December had spread throughout the room, as the marble hand of the statue had seized hold of his hand.
“Repent!” the statue had ordered. “Repent!”
Death had drawn close, and the words had been the words of a foreign language.
“Chi l’anima mi lacera, –
Chi m’agita le viscere!
Che strazio ohimè! Che smania!My life, my goods, my
Che inferno! Che terror!”
This was what he was singing, as the demons dragged him down to hell like another Doctor Faustus. Just as “Sie kommt! Sie kommt!” in The Magic Flute made you feel fluent in German, so “Che inferno! Che terror!” sounded comfortingly comprehensible to those who had once thought they couldn’t understand a word of Italian. Mozart wrote in a language that a citizen of any nation could understand. Sometimes his librettist wrote in German, sometimes he wrote in Italian, but Mozart’s unchanging language of music was universal, and words were not needed, barely heard. Liking Mozart was a slightly odd, esoteric taste, something that might perhaps be better not expressed if you wished to impress.
There was the end of a plug of absorbent cotton sticking out of Papa’s nearer ear, his left. It looked like something inserted hastily, with no thought for how it looked, no attempt to press it neatly out of sight. The inner part was darkened, yellowed with oil, the outer part as fluffy and white as the edges of springtime clouds. I wandered lonely. The daffodils fluttered and danced, beside the lake, beneath the trees. He must have been in pain from an earache. The cotton was as smooth and bright as the snow that settled around it, upon it, but it would be soft and warm. It would soothe and lull into sleep, and deaden sound. If she called his name, he wouldn’t hear her. The cotton would deafen him, his ears sealed so that he could not be disturbed, so that he could sleep, a Ulysses freed from temptation as the Sirens sang alluringly. For many years he wandered, and after all his years of wandering his own child would eventually kill him.
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