The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  Sarah is used to looking for the buck in all those familiar x, y and z places. She has no desire to bite the apple of any bigger city experience. “You’ve gone behind my back again, Harry, making decisions that affect me without consulting me first to see what I wanted.”

  “Well, I was planning to keep it as a surprise, an Xmas present. Don’t you think it’s time we both took off our vagabond shoes, eh, start this whole thing over with a clean slate? Besides, after what you did, shooting off your damn mouth at the MAAMA luncheon, I think it’s wise we give this city a rest. With all the talk we can hardly show our faces.” Then he adds, “I should think you would welcome the chance to go back east and see your old friends. You do have some friends, don’t you?”

  Of course they both know that the story about her being from the Hub has as many holes as the big loaf of Emmenthaler cheese they brought back from their honeymoon. “No, please,” she says hollowly, haunted by the familiar. “I want to stay here, Harry.”

  “But you’re miserable here, Cupcake. It’s obvious. Is there something holding you here?”

  There is nothing she can say. Retaliation, Sarah knew it, more artful than the heelishness of some men she’s known, but vengeance just the same. Harry uses her lack of openness to him as a goad to keep her in line. And if she’s not going to be an in-house whore she’s going to have nothing to say about the external trappings of their home life.

  “I know something is rotten in the Bay Area, Cupcake, but I’m not sure what.” Going fishing again, he uses the name he heard that night in Mondo Banco as bait. “Is it something about … ‘Corn Dog’?” He drops the name as if it were a bomb and waits to see her reaction.

  The name that sent Laudette scurrying strikes a chord of alarm, turmoil, and surprise in Sarah. Her eyes wiggle with agony. How did he know? But she stiffens her lips, and raises her eyebrows, masking her confusion at the sound of the buck’s name, and trying to look ignorant. “I have no idea what you mean.”

  “I heard you that night in Mondo Banco calling for someone by that name. Gee Bee’s father, maybe? He’s dead, isn’t he? Is that it?”

  No reaction. But behind the smooth stone facade, the inner Sarah is crumbling. She must go back upstairs to her room. “I don’t have to listen to you,” she says and tries to exit.

  When he sees prying will get him nowhere, the playboy eases up, but again stops her from going. “I’m sorry, Cupcake,” he says, looking into her zombie eyes, feeling haunted by her. “But it’s hell on me just standing by and watching you ruin your life by hoping for something that hasn’t got a ghost of a chance. If the boy is dead, let him lie. There’s nothing you can do.”

  Her nerves jangle, the snakes in the pit of her stomach writhe, her heart spins like a weather vane in a cyclone, but her face remains a stone wall.

  “Oh, Cupcake, come on,” he says, “you know you’re the apple of my eye. The Big Apple is exactly where you belong. When the most beautiful women in the world come in, you’re at the top of the heap.”

  Sarah, Sarah, quite contrary, is nothing but contradictions. Her fickle life is built around a core of emptiness, not the full primal and final selfless void that The Poongi Book of the Dead celebrates, but a personal kind of nullness, an abandoned, vacuous grandiosity, that is the very soul of vanity. As thorny as she is about physical affection, tortured by these moving plans, she nevertheless can be gulled by flattery.

  “Go on, you’re just saying that. We’re going because you think that in the Empire City women like me are a dime a dozen. You don’t really think I’m the world’s most beautiful woman, do you?”

  “Yes, my dear. And not only that, you grow creamier by the month.”

  It is true. Nothing can take polish like an empty shell. Beautiful Sarah has such an eccentric streak in her conceit that any inkling of self-love makes her despise herself more, just as she despises Harry for loving her, and admiring her beauty.

  “Trust me,” he says, shaking her shoulders gently.

  Yes, she nods, defeated. Unable to trust herself, she will follow him.

  The Museum

  Art in Heaven is dead ahead of his time, but back to let us in on the ground floor of the haunt we call “the museum”, the muses’ hallowed hall where the arts might be protected from history, where the stories might echo with the ghosts of the heroes, heroines, and villains of myth, and where jazz greats and near-greats might come by to blow in the flesh. This epic marble palace from the gilded era, Fifty-Two Hundred East End Place, is located as far east as Gotham Isle goes, midtown, where Swing Street would be if the East Fifties could go any further, and were not stopped by the river. “It’s Avenue E for Easy Street”, as those around the Apple say. Literate types who cross this threshold might live in metaphor as literally as in a big house on easy street.

  Hence upon a time, it will be our privilege to grow up here, unique among the rich and famous, one-of-a-kind crazy kids, mixed-up because our house is a sanctuary for the subjunctive and the subjective. My brother and I might be here now to meet you and greet you, but you must show yourself around. Please make yourself at home. There’s plenty of room for roomers.

  Besides stories, houses and fiction might have other things in common. For a property of one or the other to be bought sight, site, or cite, unseen, it must possess a famous maker or be an inside plot planned by celebrities. Our house has just such color in its stories. The eminence of its designer and the notoriety of its previous residents cause Harry to say “I’ll take it” without ever laying his eyes on it in person. In a city that never sleeps what fine old house doesn’t have a history which gives it a ghost or two?

  The background noise on the place harks to eighteen eighty-eight. Coal is king. And the King Coal heiress is a social butterfly named Penelope Laine King, whom everyone knows as “Penny.” She makes her debut in the City of Brotherly Love and is promptly snatched by a boy named Ulysses McLennon, the thrice great-grandson of John Ulysses McLennon, a founding father from the Bay State and a signer of the Freewayfarers’ Charter, the Carte Blanche, and the Statutes of Liberty. The fruits of the McLennon tree are brawny men. Ulysses is a big boy, tough, an adventurer, a good talker, too, and, by all of Penny’s family’s opinions, a great catch. King Coal confers great wealth but no standing in high society. Meanwhile the McLennons’ ancestors came over on the Odyssey. Some of them actually dumped tea in Beantown Harbor. Proper Beanies themselves, it is said of the McLennons that they talk only to the Cabbages and the Cabbages talk only to God. But however high their station, their old money no longer buys the yachts it used to. And so they smile at their son’s wedding, and welcome the filthy, rich status-hungry coal Kings into the family.

  The couple at the altar is young, he not halfway through Hall University, she having just found her wings, but they have blessings and much support on both sides. Penny’s new husband likes to sail, so her father builds them a grand mansion on the ocean, in the Ocean State, out on Prosperity Point. The McLennons are glad to help them decorate it with knick-knacks and colonial era curios.

  Understood in the arrangement is that Ulysses gets to be near his real love, the grey-chopped, salt-spumed Titanic Ocean. Ever since he was a boy Ulysses has been smitten with the off-shore life, been bound by the spell of the sea. Not content to just take it easy, surfing and playing volleyball on Hyaline Beach, the daring McLennon soon graduates from sailboat racing in Rohunkit Bay for the university team to taking transoceanic trips. Before long he is missing for months on end. He turns up once braving the cannibals in the Deep South Blue Seas or another time cutting through ice in the Boreal Ocean, or shark fishing Down Under, proving in the name of sport to what limits a man can go in a forty-two-foot yacht, with the wind in his sails and a fish knife in a leather holder on his hip. His sense of adventure is doubled by having the woman in his life not at his side but waiting in her place at home. It keeps him young at heart, courageous, as he felt when he was growing up and he would hit a snag in the bay and ca
me home late. He knew his mother would give him hell when he got home, but never be more glad to see him.

  His heroism is applauded not only in Prosperity Point but at yacht clubs all around the Freeway. Everyone applauds but Penny. The young Queen Coal had hopes for an entertaining social life, but without a husband by her side, to sit across from her at the dinner table, her sense of self-respect is violated in the boy-girl-boy-girl arrangement of such affairs. For the butterfly to appear in public without a husband to escort her is insufferable. Besides the Point is such a small town. The air lacks the light party atmosphere necessary for her to flutter in the style to which she is accustomed.

  Of course, Penny is bright enough to read the writing on the wall. With the Gay Decade upon her she can think of better things to do than walk the cliffs at the Point and watch like a widow for her husband. She exploits her sense of violation in the boy-girl order and finds herself drinking too much, flirting with her male dinner companions, and making little off-color jokes with them. But after a brief bungled affair with a married man—their clandestine meeting in his beach bungalow happened upon by the town gossip—she realizes that for all its open sea breezes, what a fish-bowl, how stuffy, stiff, and stifling the Prosperity Point community is.

  After ten years of bad marriage, she asks Ulysses for a divorce so she can find a more suitable husband while she is still young and flighty, but the good talker will have none of it. He thinks she must be joking. “We’re happy, aren’t we? Of course, we are.”

  The McLennons, a family that brought their beds over with them on the Odyssey, have a colonial family tradition which says, “You made your bed, now lie in it.” Divorce is out of the question; there is no sense discussing it. Quality society is like organized crime. The pay is good, but you’re in it for life.

  The butterfly figures she is going to flit around on the wild side again, but this time in a place where the air is not so stuffy. No one objects to her taking an extravagant chunk of her fortune and playing with it. She taps into the coal mine and starts work on a second residence, this one in Empire City, a home away from her old colonial home. She has plans to use the new house for big-time, big-name entertainment in the winter season. To suit herself she wants to make it the furthest thing from the early Freeway. McLennon family tradition makes only one demand: that it be on the water so the seafarer can sail in. She finds an empty lot on half of a river-truncated block in midtown, on the east side of East End, and hires Hudson Homer to design a house for her.

  Because of his restoration of epic details to building, Hudson Homer is a legend in his own time, the architect of robber barons. He shows her the blueprints for a freestanding four-story-high court, surrounded by living quarters, north, south, east and west, illuminated from above by a peaked, stained-glass roof. Penny is surprised that the plans include no windows at all on the east side, not one view, except through some high portholes in the kitchen, of the water.

  “If people want to see water, let them take a boat. The ones you want in your house come to see you, right?”

  Right! An imperial way of thinking! Penny loves the plans and grows to love the planner. She starts spending more and more time in the Apple with the architect overseeing the construction of the house. Homer is a spare rib, a slight, bald, mild-mannered, bespectacled man, a landlubbing home body, not the type women are known to go wild for. But if meat was what killed the lady she would have been dead long ago in the arms of brawny Ulysses. A lovey dove in the hand is worth a crew of big beefy rovers at sea. The architect is there to help her celebrate her first night in her new home. After a few glasses of champagne, he raises a monument of love for Queen Penny.

  Homer need not plan nor Penny scheme to spend time together. With Ulysses at sea most of the time, and in almost every case, late coming home, the lovers can count on plenty of opportunity. The butterfly’s flight to his arms dissolves her interest in home decorating and social gatherings, of being the hostess of her own private grand hotel full of overnight merry-makers. Satisfied by love, loving Homer is all the party she needs.

  For ten years the affair is smooth sailing. Then, one October night, resourceful Ulysses catches a tropical tail wind off the Garden State shore and comes gliding into the Empire City harbor, a day ahead of the hurricane and the letter he sent from Chasateague, in the Old Dominion. Home early for the first time in twenty years of marriage, he finds his wife asleep in the arms of Hudson Homer.

  Ulysses, a fool of overconfidence, actually never suspected a thing. The shock of discovery throws him into a rage. He puts Homer into a headlock and threatens to castrate him with his sailing knife.

  Penny to the rescue, pleading on the half-swooned Homer’s behalf, tries to peel the powerful Ulysses off, but cannot. When Ulysses makes a test cut of her lover’s pajamas and starts poking around in his ribs, Penny, driven to protect the man she loves, is forced to take out her lady’s night special, the small handgun that she keeps hidden in the bedside table, and use it. Before it is over she fires a pair of bullets into the back of her husband’s head. Lead-brained Ulysses slumps over the bony breast of Homer, limp in the bed he was so rarely in, dead.

  At the trial Hudson Homer is the only eye-witness and testifies in Penny’s defense. “It is because of that angel I still have balls on which to swear!” he swears. “Surely it was justifiable homicide.”

  Correspondents from every major newspaper in the country come to the Apple and wait along with Penny for the jury to come in. Were the members of the all-male panel convinced that Penny acted in reasonable defense of another?

  “Not guilty!” says the foreman, citing Homer’s moving testimony.

  For Penny, life begins at forty. Acquitted, she tells Homer to make himself at home in the fabulous four stories he has built. And they live together happily for twenty-two years after, until they die as they lived, in one another’s arms, asphyxiated as they sleep by gas leaking into their bedroom from a faulty valve.

  They are found in the morning, resting in peace in their plush gas chamber, by the same old maid who years before had to wash the bloody mess that splattered from the bullet wounds in the brawny head of brave Ulysses.

  The place then comes briefly into the possession of the infamous bootlegger and gun runner Augie Dicesare. He pays a small fortune in cash to Penny’s estate for the house and its contents. His stay is short.

  He barely turns the key in the door when he is arrested by federal agents for income tax evasion. The government wants to know how he got the money for digs like the museum when he has never paid a penny in taxes.

  Augie is convicted and put into a big house of a different color. The tax collector is a grim reaper and seizes his mansion for back revenues and fines. But a property of such size and value is not converted back into cash overnight. Because of bureaucratic red tape and technicalities the auction takes years to set up. In the meanwhile the mansion goes unoccupied. But in the end Augusto Dicesare renders the Land of the Free the things that are its. He pays his debt to society when Harry Swan buys the prized possession at government auction.

  Silk Networks

  In the modern era, sharp symmetrical lines, unembellished curves, and alternating current are in fashion. Applied science is making natural lighting history and photographing the appliances of a bright new tomorrow. But back when Penny loved Hudson it was in the glow of gaslight and by the heart of an open fire. Augie would have made the switch to the bright steady glare of the electric lamp and modernized the coal stove which, even when fully stoked, barely heated the lowest level, but his assets were frozen by the court and the home improvements had to stop.

  There are only three shopping days to Xmas when the Swans open their present. Harry’s surprise opens his eyes as much as it does everyone else’s. The federal government is a lousy housekeeper. The custodian appointed by the court to look in on the place has kept the home fires, inadequate as they are, burning at a minimum. Outside it is a gray winter day, inside it is almost a
s damp and chilly. Over the years moisture—condensation in the oversized central room—has taken its toll. There is mold on the moldings and a dark green and damp fuzz growing on the stones of the walls and floors. Spiders spew silk networks in every direction, and there are creepy black holes in the baseboards that evidence marks long in the tooth.

  They are all, in one way or another, bewildered, bewitched, and bothered by every fusty, time-worn detail. Overall the big hall they enter is cross-shaped. It gives Harry the faint, queasy feeling he gets when he goes into a Patriano Church, and so does the art built right into the walls. Starting in the reception area, the western transept, right down the verso face of the library wall, to the edge of the south alley entrance, then up and around the outside of the kitchen, ending in the right wing, the eastern transept, in counterclockwise sequence, is a series of fourteen rectangles of plaster set into the stone. The panels are painted to depict the stages in the quest of the perfect virgin knight Sir Stanislaus de Steele for the Bowl from which the Master Emanual took his final meal on earth. The Bowl is thought to be a repository of supernatural powers, most notably the gift of eternal youth. The Stations of the Supper Bowl, large sketchy paintings, cartoonish in florid colors, are rendered in excessive neoclassical detail. The theme, a high and tight celebration of austerity, is undermined by the ornateness of the style and the panel frames which are of cut stone worked into vines dripping in the decadence of the grape.

  Sarah stays at Station I in the reception area. Here a dove is giving instructions to the ideal knight’s mother. Laudette, with Gloria in tow, crosses the hall drawn to number XIV, her favorite, outside the kitchen door. In this one, Sir Stanislaus, at the end of his quest, having won the Supper Bowl, is all aglow, juvenescent, with the X rays he is quaffing from that selfsame Holy Vessel. Harry is drawn to Station VII. By the south entrance: a depiction of the stainless saint’s famous trial by ordeal. At the midpoint of his journey Sir Stanislaus is held captive in a convent of nuns, nymphomaniac witches all. Illustrated in small vignettes within the panel, Sir Stanislaus, prisoner in their castle a year and a day, is subject to every torture of luxury and tenderness, yet he emerges in Supper Bowl VIII retaining his worthiness, still fully master of his animal nature, and thus able to continue his quest. The legend on his banner reads, “Without temptation, virtue is not remarkable.”