by Emil Petaja
There wasn’t much left of Big Tom. Just some indistinguishable bones. It might seem that some itinerant had camped in this cave for the night, that he had overheated his fire, then had been overcome by the fumes and, trying to get out had stumbled into the fire and been, burned to death. It wasn’t too plausible an explanation, considering the condition of those bones, but it might suffice. Or were they human bones after all?
Aino looked gravely down at the charred mess for a long moment, then he fished under it carefully for the piece of drift. It came out white and whole as ever, as cool and smooth to his touch as fine silk. Aino caressed it with reverence. He bowed his head to it, and put it back under his shirt, his face luminous with humble pride.
He turned. Oh yes, the box. He nudged open the lid with his foot. A wry smile touched his lips as he looked down at a tangled mass of rocks and mud and feline bones. Some imaginative youngster had given his dead cat a sea burial. Aino faced the drumming tide. He squared his thin shoulders and stepped out of the cave. He walked rapidly down the lonely beach. Born to serve, Aino had found a new master.
THE DARK BALCONY
My Aunt Ermintrude Calder may not have been the most wicked woman San Francisco ever saw, but I insist that she be listed among the top ten. I used to say to her, “Auntie, weren’t you a Maiden Lane prostitute back in the Barbary Coast days, when Maiden Lane was anything but Maiden Lane?”
Auntie would fasten me down with those improbable yellow eyes of hers. Her pale narrow nostrils would twitch and she would lash out. “I was not!” And her jewel-encrusted claws would lash out in an angry gesture too.
“Then what kind were you?”
I loved to bedevil her like that. I loved to watch that triangular mask-face of hers cloud up and her shoulders go stiff under her regal purple silk. Auntie Ermintrude was variably painted to the gills, but she was not pretty to look at. She never had been. She was too bony, for one thing, and then those odd-shaped blonde eyes of hers. Eerie, to say the least. Auntie Ermintrude was old, old, old. To me it seemed she must have always been like that. Old and ugly and completely fascinating.
I was nine when she cornered me out at the far end of her gazebo, drinking her favorite French cologne. It was then I formed the opinion that she was an old witch who took pleasure in devouring young boys and I must say that that opinion has changed only slightly during the intervening years.
Later I realized that it wasn’t my drinking her cologne that outraged her. She didn’t care a damn what I drank or if it killed me dead. And she had plenty of perfume of all kinds. They say olfactory sensations are the most vividly remembered, and I can well believe it. One whiff of that redolent heliotrope cologne and I break out in a cold sweat. No, it was my going out on her gazebo which so infuriated Auntie Ermintrude.
This gazebo, which opened but only from Auntie Ermintrude’s sitting room next to her bedroom on the third floor, was much like any such architectural flight of fancy, only longer perhaps, and through its baroque-patterned woodwork one gained a spell-binding view of the Golden Gate and environs clear off into the Pacific Ocean. Which view was, presumably, its raison d’être.
It was naughty of me to have sneaked upstairs and into Auntie’s rooms, and thence out onto her gazebo where I thought nobody would catch me sampling the contents of that intriguing bottle: filched from her dressing table. But how was I to know that the gazebo was forbidden territory to everyone but Auntie, and that anybody caught so much as sniffing the cool ocean breeze was likely to end up in a mangled condition two hundred feet down the cliff side?
As it was she almost did kill me, the witch.
You might say shame on me for teasing my aging relative as I later on did. Yet Auntie loved it. She enjoyed being told she was wicked. It made her feel young again. And if I pleased her enough she would give me this house and all her money when she died. There were other possible heirs. Ours is a careless and far-flung family. But Auntie and I had a special unspoken tie. We were different.
After the gazebo incident (the first gazebo-incident, I should say) I was packed off to school by my fond mama. Tradition has it that all mamas are sweet darlings to be cherished until they die and forever after. I don’t see it myself. But then I may be heartless and callous. Auntie Ermintrude, even while she was boxing my ears, had more appeal for me than did sweet mama and all her tears and eternal fussing. Since mama had nobody else to spoil, she spoiled me. She did a good job of it, I must say. She must have enjoyed herself thoroughly and that I do not begrudge her. But if at fifteen I found myself yawning over her coffin as it was dropped back into the great mother earth, I might just go so far as to hint she brought it on herself.
It wasn’t that I didn’t like mama. She just bored me.
I remember the day of her funeral so well. Not because I was unhappy; I remember it because my new boots got all muddy and I vaguely blamed mama for this annoyance. Also because I had a note from Auntie Ermintrude, which I clutched excitedly in my overcoat pocket all through the ceremony.
Auntie wished to see me about my future. There was no mention of mama’s demise. I was to come and see her this very afternoon at precisely three o’clock. Things would be decided after she looked me over.
Auntie met me at the door herself.
“Your boots are muddy,” she said. “Wipe them.”
She watched me carefully as I scuffed the mud off them. At last she was satisfied and nodded me in. I stepped into the awesomely huge, awesomely gloomy front hall.
“We’re all alone in this house,” Auntie said.
I stared at her. She was exactly the same as I remembered her, just as excitingly hideous. And her heliotrope perfume did things to me. All in a rush I remembered the gazebo and what had happened there. I touched my face where the little white scars were, where her glittering rings had bitten into me. I panted with excitement and terror, my brain reeling with the redolence of her perfume.
She stood quite close to me, here in the gloomy front hall of her Russian Hill mansion, looking down at me with those weird yellow eyes.
“We’re all alone,” she said again. “You’re shivering, Arthur. Get your coat off and come in by the parlor fire. You’ll probably catch pneumonia going out in all this rain. Your precious mama never did have much consideration.”
The look she flashed me when she took my overcoat made my blood jump. I wanted to laugh. There’s nothing that puts two people closer than a wicked concept enjoyed simultaneously.
“All right, stop sniggering and get in here.”
I realized I was, and stopped.
“Sit here on this couch and talk to me.”
It was wonderful sitting by the crackling fire with this wicked woman, drinking coffee with a little brandy in it. Mama had never allowed me to drink coffee, and the very idea of the brandy made me a little delirious. It was the high point of my life, and Auntie Ermintrude was indelibly stamped my favorite person.
She darted little looks at me.
“Aren’t you afraid of me?” she demanded.
“No.”
“They say I’m a witch.”
“I’m not scared.”
“The neighborhood children make up nasty rhymes about me, but they scat whenever I walk down the street.”
“They stink!” I was quite definite. The picture her words evoked made my lip curl. Them!
“Why, thank you, Arthur!” Aunt Ermintrude beamed down on me, a little ghoulishly perhaps.
“I’m not scared of anything!” I bragged.
“Not anything?”
“Nope.”
“Good!” Auntie cackled and rocked back in her chair. She was pleased with me, I could tell. “How old did you say you were, Arthur?”
“Nearly fifteen.”
“What have they told you about me?” she asked. When she cocked her head and leaned very close I could see she was wearing a red wig. I could see the netting line across her puckered forehead. I stared.
“Well?” she snapped.
I licked my lips. “One of the kids at school said you were a madam. What’s that?”
“Never mind. Whatever it means all that was a long time ago. You’d think people would spend more time keeping their own noses wiped.” Her mouth twitched and I wasn’t sure whether she was angry or amused. “So they’re still harping on that, eh? Well, what they don’t know—oh, ho! Arthur, do you remember that day I caught you out on my gazebo?”
My hand touched the little scars. I winced.
“How could you forget, eh? Arthur, do you know what a gazebo is?”
“Sure.”
It was a word I wasn’t likely to forget. She had used it several times while she went to work on me.
“It’s like a long porch, only upstairs, and you go out on it and look at the view. It’s Italian, I think.”
A new thought pricked me. “Why? Is yours different?”
She stared hard into the fire. It was as if she were seeing something terrifying—yet fascinating. I looked there too. I wanted to see what she was seeing, but all I saw were the leaping flames.
“Yes, Arthur. A different view entirely.”
All at once the roots of my hair prickled and it seemed like there were many little slimy animals crawling up my spine. All the same I itched to see what she saw in the fire…
“Arthur.”
“Yes, Auntie.”
“Run upstairs and fetch my shawl. It’s on the big chair in front of the fire in my sitting room. You know the room.”
“Sure, Auntie.”
Of course I knew the room. It was at the far end of the third floor hall. I picked up Auntie’s shawl and started back with it. Then I noticed the door leading to the gazebo. It had an opaque window in it, a window made up of little frosty spider-webs. I couldn’t see a thing on the other side. Now was my chance! My fingers were turning that cold door-knob when an alarm rang in my head. Why did Auntie want me to fetch her shawl? Why? It wasn’t a bit cold downstairs in the parlor. It was warm, stuffy. There was something crafty and bland about the way she sent me up here on this errand. It was a trick—a test!
Well, I wasn’t going to fall for it.
I swallowed my urgent desire to open the gazebo door, turned and ran for the stairs.
“Here’s your shawl,” I told Auntie breathlessly.
Her yellow eyes invaded me. After a minute she showed her narrow teeth in a ghoulish leer. “There’s a good boy,” she said, and put on her shawl.
A door banged somewhere in the rear of the house. The French clock behind us chimed the hour. Auntie muttered that it was getting late, and we must get things settled. A few pointed questions as to my preference in the matter of schools and my future was disposed of.
* * * *
Years went by. I saw Aunt Ermintrude only briefly and at long intervals. First because that was how she wanted it, then because in the intriguing business of growing up I became too involved with other interests to concern myself much about Aunt Ermintrude. She was my meal ticket. She paid all my bills. That was all I required of her. Two fellows, whose friendship I had developed during my college years, went abroad the following year. One was a half-way artist, the other a composer of sorts. They invited me to join them, and exercise my dubious gifts as a writer to make it a cultivated trio. As you can imagine it was all a device to raise hell and to avoid the tedium of earning a living.
Aunt Ermintrude agreed, but her usual brusque letter made it plain that I was to high-tail it back to San Francisco whenever she needed me. It was during my second hilarious year in Paris that her come-home telegram arrived and I knew better than to ignore it.
She was ill. I knew that meant gravely ill, dying, in fact. Aunt Ermintrude was not the kind of woman to interrupt my round of pleasure because she had the sniffles. Auntie was a great believer in pleasure. She had spent a good part of her life providing it, and as her favorite nephew I was allowed to indulge myself to the fullest extent.
But she was equally capable of cutting me off without a dime if I disobeyed her at this crisis.
You might say this was my third visit to Aunt Ermintrude’s house. Surely it was my third important visit. During my school years I had dropped in on her only long enough to wheedle extra money out of her, and on these encounters I invariably brought along a friend with me to verify the urgency of my demand. Nothing even remotely interesting occurred during these in-between visits. My mind was so preoccupied at such times that these visits were like dull but necessary trips to the bank.
I snatched a California Street cable car, although I am not particularly sentimental. A taxi would have been more to the point, but somehow I felt inward tuggings as if I actually possessed a heart. San Francisco’s hills, like the hills of Rome, have secret powers, and I defy anyone to live here any length of time and remain aloof.
I was alone, of course. I dislike being alone, and never am if I can avoid it. In me you do not find a solitary dreamer. An avid sensualist, yes. Imagination, yes. Philosopher, no. Live and let live, I say.
I had been away from San Francisco some years; college back East. Paris. And now, as the cable car lurched uphill, creaking like a schooner under a stiff wind, I gawked like a tourist at the familiar sights. At the bay-windowed facades interrupted now and again by little parks, at the mist-blue Bay with its daily quotient of ships and barges and ferries which have always seemed to me too scenic to be of any practical value. At the morning sky bounding with luminous grey clouds wind-driven from the western sea.
I worked myself up into quite a mood.
Glancing downward at what was once Barbary Coast, the Coast of shanghaied sailors and vicious Sydney ducks; and cradles of cheap flesh. I asked myself, do the spectres of that bygone horror come back to lurk about those sin-steeped streets and remember?
Of course Aunt Ermintrude and that ugly mansion of hers were uppermost in my thoughts. To me Aunt Ermintrude was that old sinful San Francisco. By the time I slid down off my sideways perch I was fretting about Auntie’s condition and lamenting how close to death she must be.
I groped for a cigarette, found none, so I stopped at the little market on Auntie’s corner. The old Italian who waddled out from the recesses of the meat freezer pinched his eyes at me oddly. Maybe he remembered me from eons ago, although that walrus face of his meant nothing to me. I daresay he is a kind, sweet, lovable man, but that sly look of his irritated me beyond measure.
I told him what I wanted, and he reached two packs of my brand from behind him. Then he held back. “You’re Missus Calder’s nephew?”
“Yes, I am.”
He smiled, but there was a glazed blandness about his smile. Mr. Piggoti respected Aunt Ermintrude. But he did not like her. No one in the neighborhood liked her. They shunned her. They were afraid of her. I remembered how she told me the children made bad rhymes about her, but hid when she made an appearance on the street.
“I hear she is seek,” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
He stared down at his beefy fingers as, if they’d suddenly changed into snakes. Then he dropped my cigarettes on the counter, picked up my money, and again gave me that sickly grin.
“Would you do me a favor, mister?’
“Perhaps.”
“My boy, he is seek, too. He cannot make the delivery. You will breeng thees to Missus Calder for me?”
“What on earth, is it?” I demanded.
And rightly. The butcher’s paper package he hiked up to the counter was bleeding at the cracks where it was tied and one corner was open enough to assure me that its contents ought, to have been consigned to the slaughter house trash barrels, not to Aunt Ermintrude.
Mr. Piggoti’s hairy nose flanged out.
“She always gets thees.”
“Always? You must be mad!”
“Twice a week, every week,” he insisted. “Ever since I open thees butcher shop. Always the same.” Mr. Piggoti’s tone was one of protest and near desperation. His wide nostrils quivered his dista
ste.
I stared.
“But what on earth does she do with it?”
“I don’t know.” The butcher’s voice was hushed and throaty. “She pay me very well. She say tell nobody, and I tell nobody. You her nephew. You take it to her. You ask what she does weeth it. Piggoti, he don’t want to know!”
* * * *
Auntie was ensconced in the great four-poster of the generally unused master bedroom downstairs. She looked like a tiny brown spider against all that antiseptic whiteness. It was shocking to see her without her red wig and her warpaint. She was almost bald, her face was speckled and a mass of wrinkles. But somehow she looked more human like this—except for those yellow eyes.
“Matilda,” she croaked painfully at her housekeeper. “You should have warned me Arthur was here. I wanted to fix up a little. Now that he has seen me as I really am he won’t love me any more.”
“Shush, Auntie. I adore you.”
I kissed her leathery cheek and meant it. Ignoring the doctor’s death room gravity, the brisk nurse’s glances, and Matilda’s sniffling, I began to flirt with Auntie and make sly references to her wicked and indecent behavior during my absence. I told her that none of the tarts I had seen in Paris had half her zest and fire.
I raved on and on, as if by all this to keep Death at his distance. I pitied myself that I had not seen more of Auntie while there was yet time, that I had not probed into the fantastic secret of Calder House and that gazebo. Now I would never know…
The doctor touched my arm, indicating by gesture that he wanted to have a private word with me. I started to follow him to the far end of the room.
Aunt Ermintrude stopped us.
“You can say anything you have to say to my face, Doctor Hubbard,” she told him, with just a soupcon of her old malignance. “I know I’m dead. It’s just a matter of hours. Or have I got even that long, Doctor?”
Doctor Hubbard pressed his lips.
“Doctor!” she croaked harshly. “You can’t let me die yet! You must keep me alive until sunset! Until dark! You must give me something! Give me something!” She fell back, gasping.