Through a Glass Darkly

by Hugh Fox

  "Well...," wondering if he should invite an excuse, that he was going to Kansas, California, anywhere else, escape, keep escaping from Ms. Corrosion/Karate... but her voice was... her voice was mellow... jello... hello again...her whole personality emerged from the phone like flowing warmth, the old angel was back again, n'est pas? "Well..."

  "We can change Christmas, no rules... any day we want..."

  "The twenty-fifth is fine."

  "Wonderful. And don't bring anything but yourselves."

  "A little..."

  "Yourselves... love you..."

  And she was (at least for the moment) gone.

  CHIPS

  Jazz festival in Olde Towne. He tells her “Look at all the old brick buildings, the river, the old bridge, fifty shops, two hundred people, you could write a novel called The Original Dream about the beginnings of American cities, les centres/ centers, the sanity of being close to the rivers, lakes, sea.....”

  They go into Momma Bear’s Restaurant, Dizzie O’Rourke on piano, a stage behind them in the middle of the street, somewhere between Rachmainoff and Gershwin’s American in Paris, coffee, chocolate muffins, usually there’s no one there, today it’s full, this couple next to them, in their fifties, a baby boy, an all-in-pink eightish daughter, a Mr. Exec about five, but there’s something not quite right about them, he feels. Resentment, pissoffedness, damnation in the woman’s face, the guy hardly there at all, no talk, looking at the ceiling/nowhere. When the sandwiches come the little girl wants chips.

  “I want potato chips, I really want potato chips, more than anything else.”

  Mom gets demonic.

  “There are no chips with this order. No chips. You’re not getting any chips.”

  The girl turns around and looks over at the counter where there are three different kinds of chips hanging by the cash register.

  “Look, there are chips!”

  “Forget it!” the mom almost screams, almost drowning out the piano outside, the girl accepts her fate and eats her sandwich.

  He gets up (time to leave anyhow), goes and buys (one buck) a bag of barbecue chips and brings them over to the table. He’s just seen his face in the washroom mirror, Mr. Angry-Pissed-Off-Long-White-Haired-1950’s-Chicago.

  “You wanted chips. So here they are,” he says and hands them to her.

  She turns gleamingly angelic and her mother, for the first time during her whole time in the restaurant, doesn’t just glow but but bursts out in First Communion/Graduation -from- Grammar- School- sparkles.

  “Oh, so many thanks.”

  Even Mr. Edge of Suicide/Amnesia smiles appreciatively and reaches up and shakes his hand as he smiles and walks out the door, his wife waiting outside all expectantly.

  “What happened? I was expecting.....”

  “They liked the chips.”

  Smiling. Everyone smiling as the jazz pianist moves on with his combo of Petruhska and Miles Davis.

  They pass by the art gallery, Banyon Arts, whatever Banyan is.

  “Let’s take a look in here,” she suggests.

  Cince de Mayo time for Veinte Cinco de Decembro, the whole mood of the place contagious, screaming BUY, BUY, BUY, TRY, TRY, TRY. Try it on! Try on what? The unhampered, unpremeditated, eternal Now.

  They walk in and this squat fatso behind the counter says.

  “Ah, you’re back with your Mr. Almost-Convincing English accent...”

  “I remember you, but it’s been a while, you’re Liverpuddlian, right?”

  “From Liverpool, if you please, nothing to do with puddles. You make it sound like goblintown and it’s really quite civilized, and, furthermore, my accent is pure Oxonian. Worked at. You’re from an Irish Catholic background, right? Well, I’m Catholic too, but a bit more toned down. Or I should say I WAS Catholic, but....”

  “And I WAS too, but on Friday nights these days you can always find me at the local Schul...”

  “Synagogue?”

  “You were supposed to say ‘Schul? School?,” then turning to his wife, “We must buy something here. I must buy something for you, your choice.”

  She’s all confused. Money problems. Supporting his ex-wife and youngest son (now 27), two houses, and they live so luxuriously, yearly trips to Brazil, steak-houses, the best plays, clothes, concerts, having come from a huge family of nine brothers and sisters in Brazil, her helping them out most of the time, Domine Non Sum Dignus, Lord I am not Worthy, but at the same time now she was a sixty year old U.S. citizen M.D. a huge salary and the best cosmetic surgeon in the world (her colleagues and boss always told her)....

  “Buy! I mean it!”

  Very authoritarian. The Liverpuddlian winks and smiles and she suddenly gets all intensely exploratory, the Polish, Italian, English, Czech, Mexican pottery, all kinds of footstools and comfy wooden sit-down and snooze chairs, pillows, foods, clothes, and all the paintings, all LOCAL, that’s what the sign read. Matisse-ish, Dali-ish, Klee-ish, Kandinsky-ish... you name it, it was all there.

  Fifteen minutes, twenty-three minutes, and finally she grabs this one small painting of a hill and a sun setting behind it. Oils all in long strings sticking out of the surface.

  “Very original!” he says, although he hates it.

  Fifty bucks.

  He credit-cards it.

  Throws kisses to the Liverpuddlian as they leave and she throws kisses back. It’s all almost Brazilian-familial for a moment.

  And when they get home and she hangs it up in her bedroom just above the light-switch, as you walk out... even he likes it... it’s a sign that says Até Logo, au-revoir, wiedersehen... have a good one.

  SURVIVAL

  At ninety-two she started (high-pitched, clarinetish) “The stairs to the music room are getting a bit too much, and perhaps I should start sleeping next to the fireplace on floor one,” “in the ‘living room,’ not ‘floor one,’” I correct her. “But I hardly live there at all since Guiseppe died.” I correct her, “Sam, there never was a Guiseppe... Sam,” she stands corrected but by a hundred and five can hardly stand at all, two crutches, but then the bone-, muscle, ultra-violent radiation and swimming eases the pain and by a hundred and four I drop in to psychotherapy her at (my usual) ten minutes after four P.M., and there's Stravinsky’s Pulcinella on the highest fi possible and she’s in her ballet tights, the whole schmear, amazingly seductive, point up, point out, “I knew a guy who dropped dead jumping off a diving board at the University Club one afternoon,” “Toi?” she asks, “Was it you?,” sits down and re-begins her childhood on the Russian Steppes, “Let’s talk about your mother again, and the muskrat hunting,” a hundred and sixteen and it’s “Why not Cuba Or, OK, Curitiba, I like it there too, voulez vous voyager avec moi / will you come with me?,” “Why not?” Writing this on my (perhaps) deathbed, 91, she’s a hundred and twenty-four now and I’m expecting a visit this morning. Surgery, face-lift, breast-lift...and, of course, a great psyche-life (my doing)...genes, pills, attitudes, foods..Adieu / So Long. A Revoir! Until the next time, but probably not.

  VISHNU’S DREAM

  She was cleaning out her office desk after thirty years in the same office, wondering where the hell, in Scottsdale, she was ever going to put all her books, pictures, notebooks, manuscripts...she’s given most of them away, everyone wanted to read Thomas Wolfe and Eliot’s essays, a little Dante (in a bi-lingual edition, another with Dor´’s horrific etchings).....

  Lots of obscure items too, Eliade’s fiction in Rumanian, which she was just beginning to decipher when she gave it up altogether when she began to see The Rumanian Mind itself as a vast surrealistic jack-in-the-box swamp that she didn’t really want to get (a la The House of the Baskerville) lost in. All of Borges in Spanish, those neat little grey volumes filled with the occult, bizarre and (metaphysically) puzzling...the signed Ciro Alegria El Serpiente de Oro, and Ramón Diaz Sanchez Mene would, of course, go to the university library...

  Into a bottom drawer filled with the best of her students’ es
says, which she had saved over the years.

  Marcia Ferlazzo. Who she remembered as “the fat girl.” Her brilliant paper on “Norse and Algonquin Mythology -- A Comparative Study.” Very convincing; you walked away believing that all the Algonquin tribes were simply crypto-Norsemen.

  Charlie O’Brien: “Iberian Script in Neo-Inca Tapestries.”

  “The Twin Myth in the Amazon Basin,” by Jennifer Heckel....

  God, she’d written it twenty years earlier. Jennifer would be forty by now....

  It was funny, she could imagine her forty! Even when she was twenty she had a kind of yellowish, faded-paper, mushroomy look around the eyes. Pretty girl, exaggeratedly arched eyebrows, but as serious as Lascaux, and she wondered whatever had happened to her, her and so many other hundreds, thousands of students she’d had over the years.

  She almost felt like it was a desecration to throw out the old papers, like she was throwing out people, drowning kittens. But what was she going to do, fill her living space with books and papers and hardly have a place to sit down?

  “H’AI - Life!

  All of the Kaddish prayer related to the dead was an affirmation of life and (Shalom) peace....

  Something she had so little of, always clawing her way to the top of...exactly WHAT? Some imaginary glass (Louvre) stepped (Maya) pyramid called rank and tenure, that’s she’d already been on top of twenty years earlier, so what was the point anyhow?

  Vanitas Vanitatum! The whole batch of papers in the garbage. And then pulling the drawer even further out and she found an old typeball for an old IBM Selectric that she’d gotten rid of fifteen years earlier...and a carved ball in a kind of “cage”...cherrywood...that her father had carved, what, thirty years earlier. Already dead now, she wasn’t sure for how long, it was already getting indefinite, ten, eleven, twelve years...almost as if he’d never been, the vividness giving way to vagueness, “presence,” immediacy now requiring quietude, invocation...although she could still invoke him, massive and angry and careful, education cut off at the high school level, but then he’d continued reading, thinking...carving....

  Looking at the ball in the cage, imagining how you’d start to begin to create the ball, working it, slowly rounding it, carving it free from its surrounding matrix.

  It was as remote from her as a pair of horns from Cätal Hüyük, a pair of earrings from the cenote at Chichen Itza, and her office, her books, her whole career seemed equally remote and unreal, the desk unreal, her hand, the eyes that saw it all (perceiver), as if it didn’t make any difference whether or not The Perceiver had ever perceived anything, the Hindus weren’t all that far off, they captured her vision and mood when they said that all reality, not just our little quirks and histories, but EVERYTHING, is but the dream of Vishnu, and when he awakes everything (his dream) vanishes....

  ELSE

  “Well, you can’t see God, the creator of the universe, as some androgynous super-guy up in the sky. How can the creator of eighty million galaxies be seen as Joe Blow in the Snow, some kind of androgyne-animated Macho Snort......”Still cute-ish at fifty, but maybe she could have worn longer skirts and less fancy-wancy jazz-heeled shoes, maybe some sort of rabbinical robes/costume to enable her to role-play more convincingly. The perfect flushed-up hair and all skin defects concealing makeup. Something more earthern, primitive, desertish, Israelish, not a veil or anything, not necessarily that far, but something that said LEAH, SARAH, RIVKA, THE ANCIENT MIDDLE EAST.

  A hand up from The Faithful.

  Professor Sam Corngold, Harvard Professor of Biblical Studies, 76 now,a widower, retired for twelve years, heart surgeries, radical weight losses, diet-changes, blind in one eye, but like he always said “All you need is one hand to carry a stab-the-enemy sword!”

  Totally against the Schul/Synagogue rules. You never dared dialogue with the Representative of the Divine...with all the Torah answers up her Chinoise sun-flowered semi-transparent sleeves.

  “It’s kind of against the RULES....,but OK, Sam....”

  “But Moses was talking to God all the time...and Adonai is male....all the original Hebrew is male, melech/king...this radical feminism of yours....”

  “The ancients were the ancients. I can’t see myself wandering around all day wearing a veil, being one of three wives.....”

  “No wives. You were married once, right?”

  Rabbi Shortfall suddenly getting very rabbinical, raising her carefully manicured hands, palms up to the heavens /roof.

  “Please rise for Kaddish,” mentioning the latest dead, the dead whose death-anniversaries (jahrzeits) were in the weekly bulletin, moving solemnly into the Aramaic, the only time in the whole service when another ancient language was used, when Kaddish was finished Corngold still standing as everyone else sat down.

  “You forgot to give Larry Berry his say!”

  The Rabbi’s face fixed, frozen, solid, almost as if she herself were lying dead in a casket, Dr.Super-Smile Berry, the President of the Congregation getting up and giving his usual thanks to the Rabbi, the Cantor, the congregation-members who were furnishing the food for the after-services snack-talk time (the Oneg), mentioning the six o’clock outdoors feast-time next week before services, an attempt to add a little zip and jazz to the usual heaviness of the services.

  Then, when he was finished, the Rabbi announcing “We will end services with Shalom, on page three hundred and fifty-two, words by Dr. Bergmeister, music by Hannah Middleman, our pianist-in-residence...,” giving Hannah a pumpkin-ghost wide smile.

  Hannah on the piano smiling, Maurey Bergmeister getting up, turning around, smiling, a retired professor of Computer Science who also was (oddly) a specialist in African languages.

  Hannah begins playing. A tiny woman with huge talents, married to Sam Middleman, a retired professor from Boston University, Mr. Shakespeare, Renaissance theatre, always spelled with an “re” instead of “er,” who smiles happily to see his focused on so adroitly wife playing her work, thinking “Women focusing on women. All within the new feminism....

  Bergmeister up on the bima now. Him on the right, Cantor Myrtle Langsheim on the left, almost looking like a couple, although Cantor Langsheim was getting oldish looking in spite of the thick layers of makeup she used on her face, her diets, her surgeries, hair dyes. Always used to be Cantor Solemnity before Rabbi Shortfall took over, but since Shortfall took over getting kind of age eight-ish, everything getting kiddie-oriented, like Shortfall always said “We’re Mom-Figures, after all, and so many Jews are drifting out of Judaism into Cyberneticism, as if the Computer were God.”

  The cantor starting out, lifting up her arms and then crossing them back and forth as she began:

  BING, BANG, AND A BIG BOOM AS ADONAI GIVES US THE EYE

  AND STRAIGHTENS OUT OUR

  BING, BANG BOOM LIVES....

  More karati-ish arm exercises, and then as she slid into seriousness, the anguish on Bergmeister’s face during the bing-bang-booming replaced by performance-satisfaction /-seriousness as the two of them began to sing together:

  BARUCH ATTA ADONAI,

  TIME TO MENTAL IT

  UP TO THE SKY,

  ASK WHO AND WHY,

  THE SPIRIT TO FLY,

  THE END OF MURDER

  THE END OF DISORDER,

  TIME TO BE, JUST BE,

  AND LET THE MADNESSES

  FLEE, FLEE, FLEE....

  Bergmeister for years writing about the madness of man in the free-will universe of beyond-sanity God, one of his books almost making the best-seller list a few (40) years back, Recreation Re-Creation, stressing the sanity of golf, football, soccer, swimming, TV-watching, mountain-climbing versus terrorists and anti-terrorists, rapists, street-murderers:

  “Sometimes I feel like asking Adonai to start all over again, and remake Mankind into something like deer or sparrows, instead of gorillas, tigers, mosquitoes...”

  The melody strong now, a little bit of almost jazz time as they reached the end:

 
BE, BE, BE, AS FREE AS A FLEA

  ADONAI AND YOU AND ME,

  BE A BEE AND BUZZ THROUGH LIFE,

  THROUGH NEO’S AND STRIFE,

  WE SHALL ENDURE BECAUSE WE

  ARE PURE GOD’S PEOPLE AND

  EVERYTHING ELSE.

  Almost applause from the audience, Bergmeister and the Cantor almost bowing, but managing to contain their bows into modest head-bends as Rabbi Shortfall took over again.

  “Beautiful. What a talented congregation we have here. So many geniuses buzzing around,” then the final blessing the first time, really, that all liberal-reform-cybnernetic-Hollywoodish-jazzbandish overtones are put aside and the synagogue suddenly becomes ancient, God’s ancient presence suddenly THERE, THERE, THERE:

  Adon ‘olam, ‘asher malakh

  Eternal Master, who reigned supreme,

  b’terem kol y’tzir niv’ra

  Before all of creation was drawn,

  L’eyt na’asa v’kheftso kol

  When it was finished according to His will,

  Azai melekh sh’mo nikra

  Then the King’s Name was proclaimed,

  V’akharey kikh’lot hakol,

  When this our world shall be no more,

  L’vado y’imlokh nora

  In majesty He still shall reign,

  V’hu yih’yeh b’tif’arah

  And he will be in glory,

  V’hu ‘ekhad v’eyn sheyni

  Alone is He, beyond compare,

  Adonai li v’lo ‘ira

  The Lord is with me, I will not fear.

  Adon (Master) turned into God, v’kheftso kol (His Will) turned into God, Melech (King) turned into God, not “He shall reign,” but “God shall reign,” not “He will be in glory,” but “God will be in glory,” not “Alone is He,” but “Alone is God,” not “The Lord is with me,” but “God is with me....,” no HE’s up in Heaven, no KING’S...... Heaven forbid, just IT UP THERE IN HEAVEN...IT, IT, IT....as if the ancient text didn’t exist at all and translation wasn’t translation at all, but modification to fit HER view of the world, world, world.....