Through a Glass Darkly

by Hugh Fox

  Through

  a Glass

  Darkly

  by

  Hugh Fox

  Through a glass darkly

  Copyright © 2011, by Hugh Fox.

  Cover Copyright © 2011 by Sunbury Press, Inc. Cover design by Lawrence von Knorr.

  NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information contact Sunbury Press, Inc., Subsidiary Rights Dept., 2200 Market St., Camp Hill, PA 17011 USA or legal@sunburypress.com.

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  FIRST SUNBURY PRESS EDITION

  Printed in the United States of America

  May 2011

  ISBN 978-1-934597-45-3

  Published by:

  Sunbury Press

  Camp Hill, PA

  www.sunburypress.com

  When I was a child, I spoke as a child,

  I understood as a child, I thought as a child:

  but when I became a man, I put away childish things.

  For now we see through a glass, darkly;

  but then face to face:

  now I know in part;

  but then shall I know even as also I am known.

  Apostle Paul

  1 Corinthians 13

  THROUGH A GLASS DARKLY

  The bell came through the cold frozen cottage cheese air like down a long tunnel filled with foam and feathers. She wasn’t sure if she were dreaming it or if it was real, and as she opened her eyes, her mind was filled with shredded slices of images and sounds (a road somewhere -- Southern France? -- lined with tall, sentry-like trees, a woman on a bicycle, probably herself, a bicycle bell ringing) that had nothing to do with anyone ringing the doorbell downstairs.

  Her gigantic bed first was like an expanse of arctic snow, then covered with ermine, or wasn’t it white alpaca, and it was only after she’d latched the flexible wire-frames of her glasses onto her ears, that she slowly came into the Now, like pouring cold water slowly to the top of a cut crystal glass.

  She made her way slowly down the stairs to the front door, everything so white, like it was all a bleached world, or made out of sugar...salt...linen...

  She opened the door in total innocence, and a middle-aged blond woman in a mink coat was standing there flanked on both sides by little dark-haired girls with long curls and red coats and dresses, a tall man who looked like Millie’s favorite of all time, Jack Kennedy, standing behind her.

  “Well, we made it, Mom,” said the blonde, and Millie looked carefully at all four of them like she was looking at paramecium under a microscope, thinking ‘People really look funny, they really do look like monkeys, or, what’s their-names, tamarinds, especially someone like this blonde woman, the hair so moussed up and fakey, and all those layers of pancake makeup, and the violet lipstick, who was really there under all the theatrics?’

  She didn’t ask them in or go in herself, her face didn’t show any recognition, so the man that looked like Jack Kennedy kind of took over and bundled them all inside like he was a sheep dog and they were his sheep.

  Only Millie still stood there for a few long moments, looking down the driveway, out across the fields, into the woods, everything covered with snow, which was supposed to make her feel optimistic and up, she guessed, but which, in fact, made her think of morgues and formaldehyde, and her dead husband, Ben. They never should have let her into the cadaver preparation room to see him being drained of blood and pumped full of whatever they pumped him full of, being turned into a mummy. It was like a horror film, and for a moment she almost expected him to come walking up the driveway in the snow all bound in mummy wrappings.

  Hands around her, bringing her inside.

  “Any word from Arthur and Bea? I thought they might already be here...”

  For what?

  ‘Knowing’ the blonde was her daughter and the girls in red were her granddaughters, but not really ‘believing’ it for a moment.

  She couldn’t remember the blonde as a little girl, nursing her, a baby, or growing up. It was as if she’d always been the artificially bronzed woman all full of herself, ego like leaven, a woman like a big Viennese egg twist like you used to be able to buy in Boston when she was a kid.

  “Maybe you ought to call them,” said JFK to Pat, Patricia.

  “We can wait a while. Why don’t you go out into the car and get....”

  Sniffing, like she was missing something that wasn’t there, Millie’s mind filling with candles and shawls and they’d go to the Poor House and sing God Rest You Merry Gentlemen, Let Nothing You Dismay, For Chri-ist Our Sav-i-or is Born This Christmas Day. Only he wasn’t, had been dead for two thousand years, and what had he saved, that’s why she was out there in the middle of the Maine Barrens, because Ben had said ‘ENOUGH, Boston’s practically as bad as New York,” pictures of the Boston Commons passing through her head like a slide show, and the Saturday afternoons on Boylston, she couldn’t remember the names, where the French library was where they always gave concerts, her head full of fur coats and Schubert and Mauriac and Cambridge and the Harvard Yard.

  JFK and the girls starting to bring in all kinds of gigantic covered pans, and then Patricia and him in the kitchen, she could hear them like she had some kind of electronic focusing-in gadget plugged into her ears...

  TAKE CARE OF HERSELF -- CAN’T TAKE CARE OF HERSELF -- DOESN’T EAT RIGHT -- ALL ALONG -- EXTENDED CARE -- INSURANCE.

  Hated hypocrisy. Couldn’t they talk to her?

  She’d been through all that, the explosion of Krakatoa, destruction of Atlantis, Pompeii, Bern (whatever killed the dinosaurs after all?), everyone slowly leaving, they’d come summers and leave in the fall, farm and academic cycles, and there was always the horrible sadistic shortening of the days from mid-June on, so she had a real sense of the death of the year, crucified Jesus, the solstice god....

  Another car in the driveway.

  She wanted to go upstairs and listen to Rachmaninoff, maybe the last movement of the Second Symphony that went on and on, and she’d play it over and over again, in her room in a rocking chair, with an afghan on her knees, looking out at the landscape of frozen hell, like Scotland north of Aberdeen, she couldn’t think of a more god-forsaken place to be exiled to, thinking of Ben and all the courtship years in all the restaurants, and the shame of orgasm and passion and then going beyond shame to some sort of Debussy-pagan Afternoon of the Flesh, with real secretions, not just a veil left behind, and then children, the two linked together like horses and bridles, sex and children, and the apartment on Arlington and the thick carpets and gray velvet sofas in the living room that you could sink into that for some reason reminded her of Napoleon’s Tomb/Les Invalides, Arthur and Bea coming in the front door, Arthur carrying a pan containing, of all things, a cellophane-wrapped baked GOOSE, as if he were too good any more for just plain turkey, and then she thought of Arthur and Patricia as toddlers, and then Patricia with a long teenage pony tail, her balletic look, before her thighs got all thick and matronly, and Arthur’s pimples and slide rules (when computers were as remote as albatrosses)....

  “Hi, Mom, how are you doing?”

  “Fine.”

  Arthur in tweeds li
ke it was prison garb, Bea all snugly in white boots, quilted coat and a white wool cap that tied under her chin... kind of chunky, like a big white ham on legs. Two teenage boys all in white shirts and ties and tweed overcoats and suits, how much money did they think she had, was that how they greased the boards so that their future could be launched with a big, pretentious splash?!

  Gregory and Kevin...just as nerdy as their father.

  The tablecloth out on the table now. She didn’t want to have to do anything, it all took care of itself.

  First a moment of everyone crowding and circling around her (“You’re looking great, Mom, a little thin,” “I just got a new MacIntosh, Grandma...”). like carp in the pond in the Kew Gardens, rising to the surface and crowding a piece of bread to death, and then they discovered TV and went off to watch Headline News, which to Millie was less interesting than Pliny’s Punic Wars.

  The women and girls in the kitchen, the men and boys in front of the TV. It had begun to snow a little outside, they could be snowed in for days, who could tell, she never noticed the weather, liked to be surprised.

  Sidled over to the piano unnoticed and sat down.

  In perfect tune.

  Actually had taken a course, tuned it herself every couple of months.

  Her great luxury -- a Steinway concert grand.

  Started to play, like opening up a giant children’s book, opening up the past, Paris, 1906-1908, Debussy had written it for his daughter, Chou-chou, who had tragically died before him.

  “Dr. Gradus Ad Parnassum.”

  It didn’t sound anything like a ‘satire’ on piano exercise writers like Czerny and Clementi. To her it was walking up Montparnasse in Paris, winter, summer, spring, fall, the essential Paris Conservatory cafe-life her, they didn’t have any idea who the old lady was at the keyboard, like there was an old, gray, weathered-clamshell in the mud her, and an inner her, all

  glisteningly alive, like opalescent velvet.

  ST. MARTIN AND THE BEGGAR

  “Gees, he’s really bad, huh,” said Dr. Graziano, looking at the hands and feet, black, gangrenous, of course they’d have to amputate, but then the surgical assistant lifted the sheet up all the way, exposing the rest of the body, taking Graziano’s hand and wordlessly bringing it down to the lower right margin of the rib-cage, Graziano nudging and palpating, gall-bladder, liver, then down across the abdomen, down into the groin, you could see the lines of the tumors following along the lymph-paths everywhere, humps, hummocks of tumors, like tells, tumobs, tumuli in the desert, it was everywhere, stopping, hating most this part of his job, bringing them in off the streets, sliding, slid already to the lips of Death’s hungry maw, Graziano just talking, the way he shouldn’t have talked, but did anyhow, “I mean, what are you going to do for this guy, you gonna do amputations, frozen sections, fine needle biopsies, you gonna classify and pigeonhole, I mean what am I, the fucking Angel of Death Keeper of the Records or something, like my mother, she had what she had, it was hopeless, they just canceled out the pain and waited, and they didn’t have to wait long, you know what I mean...,” depressed, and he knew he shouldn’t be, ought to be beyond the beyond after twenty years on the job, but he swore he was getting more sensitive every year instead of more callused, things bothering him more and more and more, like he was starting to witness his own death played out there daily all around him, looking down at the face of the man on the white sheet in front of him, weird face, potato-nose, thick eyebrows, kinky, crinkly beard, almost totally white hair crinkling down around his bulbous (like dried apricots) ears, he looked like the Egyptian God of Pregnancy/Childbirth, Bes, little dwarf god...funny he should remember that, an afternoon of Egyptian stuff over at the Brooklyn Museum, something about Bes having begun as this image of a lion, yeah, that was it, a certain leonine, savage look about the little guy’s face, noble savage, an almost midget Cowardly Lion....

  A groan, he began to stir, opened his eyes, but didn’t look at anything, stared unfocused or maybe focused on some point out beyond the ceiling, out at the end of infinity.

  “Any I.D.? Name?”

  Graziano looking for some sort of chart attached to the bed, on top of the bedside table. Nothing.

  “He don’t have no name, man,” another bum off the street, three beds down, sitting up, looking not so bad, color in his face, a little dirty, smudged, whiskery, but solid, stable, ‘whole,’ “man, I’ve known this motherfucker for years. He’s like retarded, man, like you’re not even there, like his body’s here, his head’s somewhere else, you know what I mean?” Graziano thinking to himself, this is not what Emergency Medicine was all about, these weren’t bones that had to be set, wounds to be stanched, heads and bellies and arms that had to be restitched together, hearts to be restarted, this was the boringly chronic State of the Nation. “Like he don’t even know to come in out of the cold, man. I’ve taken him into the subway a thousand times, I guess I missed him this time. I’m not his keeper, right?”

  “Yeah, right, right,” thinking Shut the fuck up already, what was the point of amputating the hands and arms of a dying man, of why do biopsies except for academic purposes, why do anything but morpheus-morphine him up, zip him up in the beyond-pain sleep-bag and let it all just fucking HAPPEN....

  Looking like he was going to lapse back into sleep, coma, over the edge into death...and then all of a sudden he stiffened, started to raise himself up on his elbows, his face transfigured like the afterflash of a sudden unexpected snapshot, and he started to talk, like he was on a stage, through the ceiling, the roof, the clouds, to whatever was out there in the Great Beyond, his voice like tubas and lower-register French horns, kettle drums, bass fiddles, where did the resonance come from in that dwarf, congested chest: “ GAN NAOUS ACHOTI KALA EEM PAREE MAGADEEM. BATI LAGANI AHOT KALA SHE RO SHEE NEEM LA-TAL ADOTZOTA RSI SAY LAL.”

  Graziano was stunned. No meaning, but the “delivery” said it all. Style, like Kabuki when he’d been in Japan after the war, who knew “what” in terms of “meaning,” but when you were in the presence of the Real Thing, you knew it...like one time when he was in Bombay and he’d gone to this Mahabharata dance drama, and....

  “What did I tell you!” said the old bum three beds down, “he’s fucking nuts, no sense,” pointing to his own grizzled, matted head, “nothing working.”

  The old man on the table stopped now, lying back down, eyes still staring through the ceiling, all luminosity, up, ecstatic, high, then the eyes closing, a slump, kind of “crack,” crumpling inward, like someone with his mouth around the top of a bag sucking in instead of blowing out...and....

  Graziano passing his hand over the old guy’s mouth and nose like he was doing a card trick, lightly grasped his wrist.

  “He’s gone.”

  “I told you....” the old bum three tables down starting in again.

  “Shut the fuck up!” said Graziano.

  As an old Jew in a ridiculously large black felt hat, like a joke hat, came down the dark hall into the bright lighted area around the just dead man, Graziano thinking The Requiem Clown, what the fuck’s next ?

  The old Jew crying. Long black coat and a face all lined and tragic, right out of a Rembrandt painting, as he came fully under the light and all the creases and wrinkles and folds of his face came jumping out at him, Graziano thinking about how Rembrandt would actually go to the synagogue in Amsterdam looking for faces for his Old Testament paintings.

  “Who was just reciting?” asked the old Jew in a thick, what was it, Lithuanian/Yiddish accent, looking down at the dead man,

  “What was he saying?” asked Graziano, “Yiddish....”

  “No, no, no, Hebrew, The Song of Songs, The Song of Solomon,” his voice cracking, “and what a delivery!”

  GHOULS

  “Here’s the whole picture,” she said, slowly opening the last door at the end of a long black corridor he had thought was some sort of utility closet or storage room, but, no, it was an immense photo gallery, almost as bi
g as the whole rest of the house.

  She turned on the lights and the walls suddenly came morbidly alive. Life in death were the words that came to him, because most of the pictures were nineteenth and early twentieth century photos that seemed at the same time as remote as ancient pharaohs, and still as if they were still alive.

  “Aren’t they lovely, all of them,” she said, going over and almost caressing the photo of one beautiful young woman in a long, white dress standing next to a white doric column. An obvious studio portrait, all the surrounding reality all erased out, leaving just the woman and the column, “My dead great grandmother, Mary,” looking at the face as if it were looking back, as if they were interacting, “Sioux City, Iowa...they had a farm...one of my great uncles told me one time, ‘Don’t you ever forget your farm roots, no matter where you go or what throne you occupy, we’ll always be with you...’ And they are!”

  Going over and opening a massive old trunk and bringing out strings of pearls and malachite and gold earrings and gold chains, feathered fans, old beaded dresses, all the time talking, her voice ritualistic and monotonous, as if everything she was saying were some sort of prayer or chant repeated daily so that eventually its edges were smooth and all you could get was the general drift and tone.

  “They never expected to make any money, were just farm folks, accumulated acreage, bought up surrounding farms, then prices kept going up, they started hiring helpers, and before you knew it they were wealthy, in a way, didn’t even want to be. The last thing they wanted to become was lords in manors, landlords...but it happened almost in spite of them /their resistance...,” putting on gold and carnelian earrings, the gold all filigreed, sculpted into endless swirls and curlicues, taking out an ancient black satin corset and fitting it around her waist for a moment, going over to another cabinet in the corner, taking out a lead crystal decanter filled with dark, almost black wine, pouring wine into a cut glass goblet and toasting all the portraits on the walls, “My darlings, I never leave you, really, I carry you in my heart of hearts wherever I go.” Nodding at the whole row of sepia Civil War soldiers, more portraits of frontier belles in long white gowns, in what were obviously white-backdropped photography studios, one old monsignor or bishop standing in front of a ruin in what looked like the Roman Campagna, another young woman all in black toasting her right back, an obvious seductress...so they weren’t all farm girls, were they, lust came up with the corn too, didn’t it...it wasn’t all maidenly and white, but.... One portrait over the fireplace, a tall, homespun woman with the eyes and expression of a startled lemur, lemur-thin, all dressed in flowing Madonnaish white.