by Daniel Klein
“Not simply decorations, Gil—a set!”
“Tim Burton comes to the boonies.”
“Oh, we are going to have fun, darling, you and me.”
“What about Michael?”
“Michael doesn’t know how to have fun, Gilly. I thought you knew that,” Babs laughs.
* * *
No one told Franny about the party’s macabre theme, so her decision to come as the Virgin Mary was innocently conceived. Her inspiration, of course, was her set for How’s Never? That set had been so effusively received by Babs Dowd—”totally original and brilliant,” Babs said—that Franny chose to further exploit her talent for biblical irony. Patterning her high-waisted, crimson gown and translucent black cloak after the Mother of God’s ensemble in Raphael’s Marriage of the Virgin, Franny designed and sewed the costume herself. But she took one liberty with Raphael’s couture: in contrast to his high neckband, hers plunged. This Virgin was going to flaunt her cleavage.
Franny is smiling at her reflection in the full-length mirror attached to the inside of her closet door. With her hair loosely pulled back by an ochre silk scarf and the palest foundation she could find as her only make-up, she does, indeed, resemble a Renaissance image of a bride—a modest, dutiful, and diffident woman-child. But, oh that cleavage! Franny has given it extra definition with some artfully applied dark powder, and her bosom pops with provocative subtext: ‘The Seduction By the Virgin.’ The Heavenly Father did not stand a chance once he got an eyeful of this!
Franny’s pièce de résistance is the mask she is now fitting over her face. Years ago, she found it in a long-unopened wooden trunk deep in the bowels of the Phoenix’s second basement. It may have been a castoff from the Much Ado About Nothing road show that came to town in 1916, or perhaps from Henry Ruprecht’s Mardi Gras Spectacular, a 1918 extravaganza that closed ahead of schedule at the request of Grandville’s Council of Clergy, an ad hoc group formed immediately after the Congregational Church’s pastor, Ambroise Meechum, sitting in the Phoenix’s front row, observed a sizeable gap between the top of a dancer’s stocking and her garter belt.
The mask is fashioned from deep scarlet feathers that fan out from the eye slits, making its wearer look both ingenuously startled and sneaky, a combination Franny can relate to. Although she was thrilled that Babs loved her set design, Franny still thinks she has pulled one over on the woman, that at some level her set mocks Babs’s play. Peering at herself through the mask, Franny feels wicked and sexy. The Mysterious Woman in Red. The Virgin Slut. For Franny, a masquerade is liberating. Masked and disguised, she can reveal a self that languishes in her day-to-day Grandville life—her uninhibited, insolent self. In this moment, she is convinced that is her true self.
She is wearing the mask as she drives her father’s pickup to the Dowd home on Pickwick Road, near the Stockbridge border. Wendell’s radio is always set to WGVS, but at this hour in the evening the station has already signed off with the Kate Smith recording of “God Bless America,” and the same spot on the dial now picks up a French station from Montreal. Franny has no idea what the woman deejay is chattering on about, but she finds her voice comforting. Franny has French Canadian roots way back in the deVries line, and she wonders if somewhere in her genetic unconscious the language means something to her. She has had this thought before, including seventeen years ago when she was first mesmerized by JeanMarc’s voice. A song comes on, something about “fatigué” eyes; only the French could get away with that kind of treacle. Franny sings along with the chorus the second time around, “Tes yeux sont tout fatigués . . .”
She cannot remember the last time she went to a party other than the cast parties on the Phoenix’s stage at the end of a Grandville Players run. The sort of men she has had relationships with over the last ten or so years were hardly party types, a good number of them for the simple reason that they were married and could not be seen with Franny at public gatherings. Early in motherhood, Franny’s interest in the opposite sex narrowed to simple sexual utility, one more way she is like her father. She wonders if Lila will turn out to be another solitary deVries; for a beautiful sixteen-year-old, she certainly seems to go out of her way to avoid relationships.
Both sides of the Dowd driveway are packed with SUVs and foreign-made sedans with nary another pickup truck in sight. Maybe the day Grandville changed irrevocably was the day when BMWs began to outnumber pickups. Franny parks on the road and walks to the front door, holding the hem of her gown up to her knees. She rings the doorbell and Michael Dowd opens up. He is wearing a puffy white toga with a hood pulled back from his face. A ghost, Franny figures.
“My goodness, who can this be?” he says.
“Mary, Mother of God,” Franny replies coyly, her mask still in place. She curtsies.
Dowd’s eyes go immediately to the Holy Mother’s cleavage. “The body is familiar, but I don’t remember the face,” he laughs.
“I’ve been away for a while,” Franny says in a sultry voice. “This is my second coming.” She is determined to play this role for all it is worth.
Franny walks past Dowd to the foyer and peers into what must have once been the living room. But the room has been transformed into a living painting and that painting is instantly recognizable to Franny: Hieronymus Bosch’s Hell. It is absolutely fantastic—an ingeniously executed three-dimensional interpretation of the nightmarish masterpiece. It is as meticulously rendered as a Broadway set. Franny is spellbound.
A ghoul in a hook-nosed mask and bat-like wings approaches her. “Whoever you are, you are absolutely perfect,” the ghoul says. Franny recognizes Babs Dowd’s voice.
“I’m just visiting from The Garden of Earthly Delights,” Franny replies.
“Why, you’re Franny, aren’t you?”
Franny nods. “This is fabulous, Babs. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“I can’t take any credit for it. It’s pure Gil Crespert. I asked him to give me a haunted house and he gave me hell. Literally!” Babs laughs and her bat wings flutter.
“The Gil Crespert from New York?”
“Yes, he’s around here somewhere. Wearing a flesh-colored bodysuit with a fish in his hand. He says it’s symbolic. Gil is a very naughty man.” Babs gestures to the large bowl behind her. “Have some punch. Michael concocted it out of something syrupy—sloe gin, I think—but at least it matches the color scheme.”
With this, Babs dances away to speak with another guest. It has been so long since Franny was at a party like this that she has all but forgotten that particular party maneuver— abbreviated conversations you quit with a laugh line.
“Dance Macabre” erupts from hidden speakers. At least thirty guests have already arrived and Franny remains just inside the room scanning them. Most of the costumes appear to be handmade or refashioned from antique dresses and theatrical costumes. Actually, most of the children who come trick-or-treating to her house on Mahaiwe Street still wear homemade costumes, just as Lila did growing up; but little by little these were being replaced by packaged Kmart and Brooks Drugs outfits that apparently resembled television characters with names like SpongeBob SquarePants and Pepper Ann.
The drink is indeed syrupy, tasting like what used to be called a Lime Rickey, but one sip is enough to alert Franny that the secret ingredient is vodka. She drains her glass and a nearby guest in a devil outfit immediately refills it.
“I was just talking about the apostrophe in Halloween,” the devilish guest says. “Between the two e’s. It’s an abbreviation for ‘evening,’ you know—Hallowed Evening. What ever happened to that apostrophe?”
“It went the way of all underused attachments,” Franny answers, making it sound as ironically lewd as possible, and walks away on her laugh line. Impeccable timing, she thinks. She should be this way all the time.
Sipping her punch, she makes her way to the far wall for a closer look at Gil Crespert’s handiwork. The burst of hellfire at the ceiling is masterful.
“Darling?
Is that you?”
Franny turns to see a figure in a black robe with gaping sleeves and a pointed hood. Its mask is a replica of The Scream, store-bought, but clearly from a high-end shop. It takes a moment for Franny to realize that it is her mother. Franny takes another, longer gulp of punch. Behind her mask, her mother is blinking rapidly, a sure sign that her contact lenses have become unmoored.
“I didn’t realize you people up here had so much fun,” Franny says, pitching her voice very low and hitting her consonants sharply, like a New Yorker.
Her mother issues her new, throaty laugh. “Oh. I thought you were my daughter,” she says, flustered.
“Fascinating,” Franny-as-Manhattanite replies airily. “Because you are the spitting image of my mother!”
Her mother laughs again, but more cautiously this time. She obviously senses that she is being mocked, but is not sure how. “That is you, isn’t it Franny?” she says.
“Goldfarb,” Franny replies in her deep phantom voice, extending her hand. “Madeleine Goldfarb.”
Immediately after shaking hands, Beatrice takes her leave. As Franny watches her mother step toward the punch bowl, she feels wonderfully giddy. She giggles, then finishes off her drink and plants her glass between the horns of a Boschinspired gargoyle. But in only this interval Franny’s giddiness is overcome by a familiar ache: How little misdirection it took for her own mother to fail to recognize her.
Franny has reached the point when a third drink would be superfluous, but that also happens to be the point when she thirsts for excess, so she again makes for the punch bowl.
“I was thinking of spiking it with a couple tabs of Ecstasy, but that doesn’t seem necessary, does it?” a figure in a flesh-colored, head-to-foot bodysuit says, coming around a rock pedestal toward Franny. The lump in the suit’s crotch leaves no doubt that it is a man, and the whole trout under his right arm confirms that it is Mr. Gil Crespert.
“Are you happy to see me or is that a fish in your armpit?” Franny says to him.
“Deliriously happy to see you,” Crespert replies. “You’re an oasis in the dunes. Or is it the boonies?”
“Neither, sir. I create my own space.”
“Well, you certainly occupy it divinely,” Crespert says, giving Franny a sultry once-over. “But I do believe you dressed for the wrong painting.”
“What can I say? I’m a Raphael kind of gal.” Franny ladles them each a glass of punch. She has not bantered like this since she was a college girl and it feels marvelous.
“I was thinking Rubens.” Crespert says.
“In any event, here’s to Hieronymus,” Franny says, clicking his glass.
“To Hieronymus botch,” Crespert responds and downs his glass. He makes a sweeping motion around the room with his arm. “I made it myself. You like?”
“Are you fishing for compliments?”
On cue, Crespert seizes his fish by the tail and swings it in front of Franny’s décolletage. “Why it’s the miracle of the fishes and the loaves!” he says through the mouth hole of his bodysuit.
“Watch where you dangle that thing, buster!”
“I think it likes you.”
“My God, it’s not alive, is it?”
“It’s in the first stages of rigor mortis. Me too, actually.”
Franny feels an all-but-forgotten sensation radiate from deep inside her: the sexual heat ignited by a match of wits. Well matched, too. It is erotic, every bit of it: the helter-skelter
allusions, the provocative double entendres, and above all, the bait-and-switch tease of it. She has not yet seen Gil Crespert’s face, but she wants to kiss it, to kiss his audacious mouth.
“Who are you, my dear? And what can I do for you?” Gil asks.
“I’m God’s mother, but he’s all grown up now and doesn’t need me anymore, so I’m looking for a new line of work.”
“I bet you’re dying to know how I made the smoke,” Crespert says, pointing at the ominous cloud hovering over Hell’s mountaintop.
Franny replies with a husky sigh, knowing full well that sigh signals her assent to the next stage of their shorthand courtship.
Gil takes Franny’s hand and leads her to the stairway in the foyer. As they start up the stairs, Franny’s eyes light on two lone figures down the hallway smooching at the kitchen door. She stops, releases her hand from Gil’s, and slips her mask above her eyes so she can see more clearly. That is a skeleton groping the bat-winged ghoul. By golly, Mrs. Barbara Dowd is a loose woman. Not that Franny needed it, but Babs has just given her permission to go wherever in Hell Gil Crespert is leading her.
That, of course, is his bedroom—the Dowds’s guest bedroom under the eaves on the third floor.
“This is where you make the smoke?”
“Where there’s fire.”
They undress quickly. Gil takes both Franny’s hands and looks at her. “Jesus, you’re a beautiful woman. Really, who are you?”
“The Virgin Mary.”
“No, honestly. Who?”
“I like it better this way,” Franny says. “Okay?”
Gil shakes his head. Defrocked, he is a fine-looking man— lean, with a full head of curly black hair and glinting green eyes.
“What’s the matter? Haven’t you ever had a virgin before?” Franny says.
They fall into the unmade guest bed.
Franny deVries stopped rating her lovers years ago. One reason is that not only has she been blessed with a shapely, smooth-skinned body, but with one that is exceptionally responsive, so even the most crude and clumsy of her lovers— say, Bob Eberhart, the Grandville postmaster—gave her physical pleasure. But until this Hallowed Evening, she had fairly forgotten the pleasures of lovemaking that transcend the tickles and screams of quick and easy orgasms. She had forgotten the sensation of losing herself in a man.
“Night on Bald Mountain” wafts up to them from the party below. Moist and hot, Franny leans over the side of the bed and retrieves her feather mask from the tangle of her costume on the floor. She puts it on and straddles Gil Crespert’s upturned body, her knees on either side of his hips.
“Hiding?” he asks. He reaches blindly for a pack of cigarettes on the bed table, finds it, retrieves a cigarette, and feels around for his lighter. Franny snatches it and lights him up.
“On the contrary,” Franny says. “I feel totally exposed.”
Gil laughs. He hands his cigarette up to her and she fits it through the mouth hole of her mask, takes a deep drag.
“You are glorious, Miss Mary,” Gil says. “Would it be too much to ask where you live?”
“Here. In Grandville.”
“Really?”
“Don’t act so surprised. That’s a sure sign of New York provincialism.”
“I seem to have hit a touchy spot.”
“Several of them, fella,” Franny replies. She winks but, of course, it is hidden by her mask. She hands back the cigarette. Babs will undoubtedly tell Gil who she is, so she decides to spill it all and be done with it. “I’m a Grandville shopkeeper with an illegitimate child . . . Oh, and I live with my father. That ‘boony’ enough for you?”
“I don’t need to be in New York for a couple more days. I’d like to see you again.”
“How about right now?”
“Could you put out this cigarette for me?”
She does and they go at it again.
It is past three in the morning when Franny looks at the travel clock on the bed table. Neither music nor voices can be heard from below. It is a school night, so Lila stayed in, and Wendell promised to come home immediately after closing up the theater. Nonetheless, Franny cannot spend the entire night here. Glorious as she feels, the idea of coming down for breakfast with Michael and Babs Dowd is definitely distasteful.
“Time to say goodbye,” she says, swinging her legs over the side of the bed.
“I’ll miss you.” Gil remains lying on his back.
“You’re very sweet, sir.”
&nb
sp; “Back at you,” he says. “I hope we can do this again sometime, whatever your name is.”
“What’s in a name?”
“For one thing, a telephone listing.”
“338-1727.”
Gil repeats the number several times sotto voce, then says, “I’ll ask for the lady of the house.”
Franny laughs. “That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
She stands and begins to pull on her clothing. Gil, a connoisseur of beautiful objects, studies her body appreciatively. Dressed, Franny searches around for her shoes, red pumps from when she played Blanche DuBois on the Phoenix stage a full decade ago. It is while doing this that she spies a sheaf of sketches on a chair. They are her drawings for the How’s Never? set. She picks them up. “Are these yours?” she asks, as casually as she can muster.
Gil laughs. “No,” he says. “Pu-lease, no.”
“That bad, eh?” Franny cannot stop herself.
“Oh, they’re bad, but not as bad as the play they’re for,” Gil says, propping himself up against the bed’s headboard and reaching for another cigarette. “Poor Babsy. She thinks if I tweak up the set, she’ll come out smelling like a rose.”
“So, you’re tweaking it,” Franny says. She feels dizzy and needs to sit down, which she does on the chair where the sketches had been lying.
“Are you okay?” Gil asks.
“I stood up too soon,” Franny says. She does feel faint. She draws in a long breath to steady herself. “You didn’t answer my question.”
“Yes, I’m tweaking it for what it’s worth. Why don’t you come back to bed, darling?”
“No,” she says softly. “I can’t.”
Franny takes a few more deep breaths, then stands again. The hell with her shoes. She walks out of the guest room and tiptoes barefoot down the stairs, a knot of hopelessness wrenching her insides. The line between playful pretender and rank fraud has evaporated, leaving her exposed as the worst kind of imposter she can think of—an amateur.
CHAPTER ELEVEN