The Freewayfayers' Book of the Dead

by John Okas

  The Stations are by an artist named Throckmorton Bacon. Meant to be timeless, although painted only fifty years earlier, by modern standards they seem pitifully outdated. Still, like the cruciform shape and atmosphere of the house itself, there is something in them that stimulates Swan’s imagination. Harry assumes that Bacon meant the series to be ironic, for its flamboyance conveys the opposite of its apparant intention. The victory cup reminds him of the “cup” in “cupcake,” the dish he’d like to be eating out of this very moment. Where else would a man find his budtime always fresh but in the sweet, wine-red cup of the ever-loving female? But does Sarah see it? He fears that she, being dragged into this house to begin with, will see only its sad shape and none of its potential for sexy fantasy finishes.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t look before I leaped,” he says. “The place is in worse repair than I expected. Sorry about that. But with a little effort no doubt we can make something of it.”

  But Sarah is not asking what she can do for the museum. She has drifted from the foyer to the center of the cross, under the skylights, where the ceiling is high, and one can see the quadrangular covered walkways, the colonnaded halls of the other three stories. Open to the inside, the house Homer built so that the butterfly could have a ball towers above Sarah. She stands high-lit, in cloistral silence. The clouds move outside and for a moment the sun illuminates the rose- and amber-stained skylights. She lifts her veil, and lets her face bask in a shower of peachy rays. With, more or less, a shade of her former self back, she glows brightly like a ghost in a radiant soft red shift. No dust, rust, cobwebs, greenmold, or rats can spoil the feeling of home sweet home. She puts her lips together and lets out a long high whistle and listens to the echo. For the first time in their married life Harry sees her smile. But it is not an expression of joy, or even amusement. It is a faraway beam, a fractured grin moved by a spirit torn between being and nothingness.

  However light the center, elsewhere around the first story darkness is the rule. As Hudson promised Penny, no windows at all along the river-side save in the kitchen where the small portholes were added for the sake of ventilation. And even in the library, downstairs parlor, and dining room, on walls which face other directions, the windows are small and, as if to shed light on the dark side of the mind, placed dungeon-style, transoms to be gotten at only by pole. At eye level the walls are unbroken blanks of marble.

  As always Gloria makes herself scarce at home. The darkness doesn’t scare her. She can feel the power in the wings. With the watchful Miss Lord clomping after her, the baby Bee buzzes past the stone lions that silently stand guard at the foot of the stairs and flies up to the second story to check through all the rooms for secure nesting spots, nooks and crannies to hide in and be alone. She doesn’t have to go far to hit paydirt.

  To left at the top of the stairs are several parlors. Meant to be reflective of an epoch which named itself excessive, they are styled after those popular in the courts of the Bon Vivants before the revolution, when Gourmet Kings built palaces where dining and decomposition made the sign of the cross, where decay and intrigue were celebrated in love-making and cuisine, and the fine artists, likening their sponsors to the luminaries of classical mythology, genuflected and kissed the rings and what-else of the lords and the ladies who commissioned them.

  Red velvet drapes, heavy and elegant, hang like punctured windbags from big bluff balloon cornices but here the windows are large, lead-latticed casements, and the curtains threadbare to let in enough daylight for Gloria to see her way around.

  In the Parlor of Angels the walls are painted with images of cloud-hopping cherubs, airborne children with heart-shaped buttocks, wings, baby-sized penises, and hairless scrota, shooting arrows of carnal desire, taunting and teasing one another, playing peek-a-boo behind streamers, clouds, and one another’s wings. Across the hall the theme is bosomy sea nymphs, naked lady-fish rising from a deep sea-spray blue. There are roses everywhere, even at sea, but the adjacent Parlor of Roses is a garden. Beds of them bordered with lavender fill the panels. The painted climbers on painted garden gates, reaching up the walls for the ceiling, are fading and dusty, yet they still seem to grow. The beauties spread out into the hall and collect themselves in a bouquet fantasia of symphonic proportions in what was Penny’s Anteroom, the Parlor of Cups. In this, the largest parlor, there are nine large panels. These show a lady being catered to in each of her three-times-three stages of love. No doubt her fine flitty features and diaphonous wide-sleeved gowns gathered at the wrist resemble those of Penelope King, who commissioned the murals from Claude Bougatti. Here she is, an immortal with a cornucopia of fleshy delights on her hands, in her cups, wining and dining as if in heaven, paradise illustrated as the most voluptuous of interiors, salons in which the tipsy queen reclines, semi-draped, on a soft cloud of pillows while drones, dark and turbanned, fan her with ostrich feathers and palm fronds. There are scenes of the fair milady at her vanity, pouting and powdering her nose, of her bathing, being dressed by her maids, receiving gentlemen at court, and in her bed with heavenly handsome boys all pricked up with the arrows of love, ready to refill her cup with nectar. The ceiling is vaulted and painted in flowery beds of clouds and sea foam. Erotic angels and sea nymphs sport amid garlands of flowers. In the vaults the perspective lines of air and sea and earth are stretched to a point, which, were they sentences, could only be described as bombast. In the center, at the peak of the vaults, like the sun itself, in gold leaf, is a loving cup: the goddess source from which those plots overflow, the hidden spring to which all life must return.

  Thrilled with the rosy atmosphere, the eyes of Glory are wide with wonder. She is delighted to see in the center of each room, covered with a white dropcloth, like a ghost camp, is a jam of the big clumsy furniture that went with the deal: imperial antiques—sofas and chairs with cushions as overstuffed as geese bred for their livers, and tables with claws and paws carved at the end of their legs. This furniture and those drapes, the perfect items for her science of tentmaking, and such interesting old accouterments gives a plus to their perfection.

  Laudette, who pulls up behind her, is offended by the overdecoration and scandalized by the open show of sex organs and the randy doodles on the walls. She does everything she can to shoo Gloria back downstairs, telling her to pay no mind to these silly pictures. But by this time the Swans have made their way up to join the baby-sitter and child. Harry is excited by the pictures and implications. Sarah still regards it all with a cracked grin. Laudette can’t understand why everyone else is agoggle. “No doubt, Sir Harry, as a decent man, you’ll have these walls painted over white the first chance you get.” Harry tells her that if anything he plans to have the murals restored and Laudette is just about to protest when Gloria, ahead of them all, already having made it to the bedroom, shrieks “Eeeeeaiiiiyiyi! Mummy, Daddy-o, Lawdy Lord, lookeeeeee!”

  The suite of roses is a suite within a suite, a luxury bridal path that leads, through an arching, shapely vault, into the bedroom where, Ulysses, Penny, and Homer all breathed their last. Harry, Sarah, and Laudette enter and see what the Bee is buzzing about. All three have to whistle. Homer was a glutton for irony. He designed the queen butterfly’s chamber with himself rather than Ulysses in mind. In the southwest corner is an ocean liner of a bed, beyond king or queen size, it is a full, imperial size replica of the grand sleeping accommodation of Empress Theodora. Legend has it that this prodigious monarch slept in a crib large enough for a horse. Harry walks it off, the mattress is a curtained, canopied sixteen-foot square. Its four posts and massive headboard are tree-trunk-thick oak, carved into a medley of fancy and familiar themes, owls and doves, dolphins and snakes, hearts and flowers, cranes and storks, sea dragons, intertwined, riding on the curls of the waves of love. More than decoration, the bedposts, running from floor to ceiling, are part of the structure of the house. They are the pillars that keep that corner of the third story from falling into the first.

  Perhaps you thin
k that Art in Heaven is pulling our legs, talking with the license of a poet when he says how large the bed is. Having eyes like those timeless orbs lyricists dream of, plentiful pastures where bodies are assumed by exquisite music and beatific visions, my brother is often subject to speaking in metaphorical tongues, but in this case there is no hyperbole. When he says that this grandiloquent overstatement of a place to sleep is sixteen feet square he means every inch of it: the bed is literally as big as a small house. Big, yet it is something finite, part of this world although it has connections to the next. We can each personally attest to that. My brother and I, will someday be conceived and born in it.

  Our grandmother Sarah takes an armful of oak, finds a pully and draws back the curtains. Sealed-in and unchanged for years, an atmosphere of nitrogenous vapor chains, green, cryptic, musty, and softly ticking with the mildew smell of a final resting place, rises. This air seems as if it could kill the living and bring the dead back to life. The bed linens, top and bottom six square yards each, and the lace-trimmed pillow cases, are yellowed and moth-eaten. Sarah plumps up a pillow and in the dust hears echoes of answers to her prayers; things come to her from beyond the senses. She puts her palm to the mattress. As if she were making some sort of connection, her deranged face brightens. Past and future presences meet in a mumble of memories and a jumble of intuitions. Here is a place, her heart sighs, where zeroing in on the dead has more than a ghost of a chance.

  What’s more, the unborn live. My brother and I come to mind and already find ourselves gone.

  Bless This House

  To each of the four in the household the bed is a different story. Laudette sees spooks in it; Gloria sees an excellent place to hide; for the playboy it is a classic stage for sex games; the split pea finds it a perfect place to crack.

  While the others make their comments on its epic size, how a single person would only need a tenth of it to be comfortable, the uniqueness of the posts, what filling is in the extra-large, double-plush mattresses, Sarah’s smile gets even more crooked. She thinks she hears distant baying. The dogs! Or is it her imagination? Are her litanies, her bitches and moans, finally getting her somewhere? Harry nudges her, and asks her if she would like to see the rest of the house and then go out to catch a bite, but she does not answer. There’s a babble, cross-talking voices and raspy whispers, mumbling and grumbling, numberless rhymes in her head, and she is trying to pick something out. The look of concentration deepens in her eyes. She feels pulled to the hall where in a closet she finds, folded like flags, large as parachutes, protected between layers of waxed paper, fresh linens. There is also a broom and dust mop.

  She surprises them when she comes back swinging at the dust, muttering and stuttering under her breath. Harry tries to give her a hand, but she goes after a cobweb as if he were not there at all, and nearly hits him in the head with the mop. Usually moony and lethargic, this burst of energy is not like Sarah. But if the split pea is consistent in anything, it is that she can be counted on to contradict herself. It doesn’t take everyone long to give her the space she needs to carry on her cleaning. Harry looks at Laudette. Gloria sees them shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. Mummy is a sad case. Harry nods and Laudette takes Gloria by the hand. The three of them leave the room, and finish their walk through the house.

  Over on the east side of the second story they once again find no windows. The dressing room has mirrors running along every inch of wall space, reflecting an infinite vanity in all directions. Then there is a bath, with a marvelous marble soaking tub with brass feet like a big lion’s paws.

  “Why, it’s as big as the holy water font the Dipster Jackson used to douse us in by the dozen,” Laudette says, recalling her youth as a member of Jambalaya Jackson’s Dunkard Church. “He called us his ‘Donuts of the Almighty!’”

  There’s another room, in the northeast corner, a small second bedroom, with plain white walls, a straight-back chair and a desk. The bed is so narrow there is barely enough room for a man to roll over in it. With perfect economy of space there are drawers and shelves beneath. It is really not much more than a ship’s berth. The room is as modest and austere as the one diagonally across the courtyard, the one that Sarah is cleaning, is excessive.

  This would be Homer’s, or was it Ulysses’? Whoever’s it was, Harry thinks, it’s a refuge of simplicity from the complications of women. But, he muses unhappily, separate bedrooms only work when a man has one, but is invited to visit his lady’s chamber.

  The third story is a hotel. There are a dozen rooms designed as guest quarters for when the butterfly’s house would be filled with overnight party guests. Most of the rooms are unfurnished, several are unfinished. Love made Penny cut her entertaining short, and want no other overnight company but Homer. The three larger rooms on the west side were taken over by Homer when he moved in. He worked in them for over twenty years, doing blueprints, and enjoying his woodcraft hobby.

  The workshop, with its tool benches, drafting tables, and drawing boards occupies Harry and he takes a few moments to investigate, but Gloria and Laudette quickly lose interest. While they precede him to the fourth and final level, Harry pokes around. He makes a discovery inside the closet in the southwest corner of the house: a door that leads to a passage between the inner and outer walls. The reason Homer needed those four bedposts to hold up the house is that the wall behind them is hollow in order to accommodate a hidden staircase. The well, secured to two of the bedposts, was a way up or down to the mistress’s bedroom, designed by the architect as a quick getaway should Ulysses come home unexpectedly. Harry lights a cigarette, keeps his lighter burning and explores. Shortly, one flight of cobwebs down, he is a silky mess standing inside the south wall of the big bedroom. He can hear his wife on the other side of the wall, whispering, sighing, sobbing, as she works. He feels along the wall for a way to her, a latch of some kind, and finds a string about knee-high. He pulls it and a low door opens. He gets on all fours and crawls forward head first.

  She hears rattling coming from the lower compartment of the large oak cabinet next to the bed. It startles her to think perhaps her prayers are being answered. Her derangement softens as she approaches the armoire cautiously.

  “Cornie? Is that you?” she whispers.

  Flinching, she slides back the bolt of the fancy brass device on the hardwood door.

  Oh, what a disappointment it is to find Harry, web-coated, on all fours, instead of Corn Dog!

  She will not share her bed but will share some feelings she has about the house with him. “I’m cleaning up my corner here, Harry, but let’s not be too extreme about putting this house in order. We want to preserve the haunting quality of the place and not modernize it out of existence, right? And we mustn’t take advantage of these strange passages to be spying on one another.” She turns a cold cream cheek. “You may kiss me goodnight, then turn yourself around and go back the way you came.”

  She leans forward, presents her cheek, then pushes him back to a squat, helps him into the armoire and out the rear. When he is back rattling around in the walls she slides the bolt on the doors, back and front.

  Locked out, he goes upstairs to rejoin Gloria and the sitter. They are exploring the fourth story: the greenhouse, a solarium high enough from floor to skylight to grow good-sized trees. They are sad to see that the plants in the huge clay containers have gone to pot. Uncared for by the government, what once must have been an oasis of greenery now stands as stumps, dead and brown.

  “Fooey!” says Laudette to Harry when he joins them. “A lot of room, but nowhere to stay.”

  “But with some work this place could really be a palace,” he says. “Hey, I don’t know about you girls but I’m famished. What say we go out for something to eat?”

  “Yeah, Daddy-o.”

  “Ready whenever you say, Sir Harry.”

  On their way out he goes back to the big bedroom, knocks on the hall door. “Cupcake, are you sure you wouldn’t like to go out with us? I
’ve heard there’s a good Attic place right around the corner …”

  He gets no answer.

  While her family sits in the Acropolis Restaurant sampling the wonders of spinach pies, feta cheese, and oregano chicken, Sarah cleans and dusts the room, strips the bed, and works in a frenzy, spreading out those colossal fresh sheets.

  When they return, there is a dead silence coming from the big bedroom. The master is left like a dog in a strange house, sniffing around for a place to lie down. He makes his way back up to the workshop where he tries to get comfortable on a day bed he finds there, but thoughts of how incommodious his marriage of convenience has turned out to be continue to plague him.

  In the meanwhile Gloria, with Swan’s consent, settles into the Parlor of Roses. Like it or not, the baby-sitter must be on hand, nearby, and has to make the hard choice between the mischievous angels and the bosomy mermaids in the deep blue sea. Pacing the hall, undecided, going through a bag of donuts which she bought for the morning, the sitter can hear Gloria the tentmaker upholstering a camp for herself, taking down drapes, stretching them over a furniture framework, removing all the needlepoint rose cushions from the chairs and laying herself down to sleep. “Bless that child, Lord,” Laudette prays. “It doesn’t scare her to be on her own, and thank goodness she doesn’t make too much work for me. And bless Sugar. Please keep her from going out of her mind completely. And bless Sir Harry for having a good heart and the money and the patience to take care of us. But above all bless this house, because if there ever was a place that had the devil in it, here it is.”