“Imagine the young man’s surprise, then, when he now saw not a dark empty place, no, but a place of bright Christmas lights shining all fuzzy through the fog. Could this be the old man’s house? Lit up with these lights? Yes, it could, because there was the old man himself standing at the window with a rather friendly look on his face. At least for him it was. So, one last time, the young man thought he would try his luck with the old house. He rang the bell and the front door slowly opened wide. The old man didn’t say anything, but merely stepped back and allowed the other to enter. Finally the young antiquarian would be able to study the inside of the house to his heart’s content. Along the way, in narrow halls and long-abandoned rooms, the old man stood silently beside his guest, smiling all the time.”
“I can’t imagine how you know this part of your true story, Aunt Elise,” I interrupted.
“Aunt Elise knows,” asserted one of my little cousins just to shut me up, saving my aunt the trouble. She went on:
“After the young man had looked all around the house, both men sat down in the deep comfortable chairs of the front parlor and talked a while about the house. But it wasn’t too long before that smile on the old man’s face, that quiet little smile, began to bother his visitor in a peculiar way. At last the young man claimed he had to go, glancing down at the watch he had drawn from his pocket. And when he looked up again... the old man was gone. This startled the young man for a moment. He checked the nearby rooms and hallways for his host, calling “sir, sir” because he never found out the old man’s name. And though he could have been in a dozen different places, the owner of the house didn’t seem to be anywhere in particular that the young man could see. So the antiquarian decided just to leave without saying goodbye or thank you or anything like that.
“But he didn’t get as far as the front door when he stopped dead in his tracks because of what he saw through the front window. There seemed to be no street anymore, no street lamps or sidewalks, not even any houses, besides the one he was in, of course. There was only the fog and some horrible, tattered shapes wandering aimlessly within it. The young man could hear them crying. What was this place, and where had the old house taken him? He didn’t know what to do except stare out the window. And when he saw the face reflected in the window, he thought for a second that the old man had returned and was standing behind him again, smiling his quiet smile.
“But then the young man realized that this was now his own face, and, like those terrible, ragged creatures lost in the fog, he too began to cry.
“After that night, no one around here ever saw the young man again, just as no one has ever seen the house that was torn down. At least no one has yet!
“Well, did you like that story, children?”
I felt tired, more tired than I’d ever been in my life. I barely had the strength, it seemed, to push myself out of the chair into which I’d sunk down so deep. I brushed up against bodies and shuffled slowly under the stares of remote faces. Where was I going? Was I in want of another drink? Did I have to find a bathroom for my old body? No, none of these served as my motive.
It could almost have been hours later that I was walking down a foggy street. The fog formed impenetrable white walls around me, narrow corridors leading nowhere and rooms without windows. I didn’t walk very far before realizing I could go no farther.
But finally I did see something. What I saw was simply a cluster of Christmas lights, innocent colors beaming against the fog. But what could they have signified that they should seem so horrible to me? Why did this peaceful vision of inaccessible and hazy wonder, which possessed such marvelous appeal in my childhood, now strike me with all the terror of the impossible? The colors bled into the fog and were sopped up as if by a horrible gauze which drank the blood of rainbows. These were not the colors I had loved, this could not be the house. But it was, for there at the window stood its owner, and the sight of her thin smiling face crippled my body and my brain.
Then I remembered: Aunt Elise was dead now and her house, at the instruction of her will, had been dismantled brick by brick, shingle by shingle.
“Uncle Jack, wake up,” urged young voices at close range, though technically, being an only child, I was not their uncle. More accurately, I was just a friendly elder member of the family who’d nodded off in a chair. It was Christmas Eve, and as usual I had had a little too much to drink.
“We’re gonna sing carols, Uncle Jack,” said the voices again. Then they went away.
I went away too, retrieving my overcoat from the bedroom where it lay buried in a communal grave under innumerable other overcoats. Everyone else was singing songs to the strumming of guitars in the living room. (I liked their bland music infinitely better than the rich, rotting vibrations of Aunt Elise’s cathedralesque keyboard of Christmas Eves past.) Foregoing all rituals of departure, I slipped quietly out the back door in the kitchen.
Though I do not remember very much about it, I must have gone to Grosse Pointe, to the empty land on which my aunt’s house once stood. So many things I can remember so clearly from long ago—and at my age—but not this thing. Leave out nothing, Jack. Remember. I must have gone to Grosse Pointe, to the open land on which my aunt’s house once stood. But I do not remember what it was like that Christmas Eve. Remember, Jack. How thick the fog must have been, if there was fog and not merely a slow descent of snow, or nothing. Would those old lights be there? You shall remember.
But I must have gone to Grosse Pointe that night, I must have gone there. Because what I do remember is this: standing before the door of a house which no longer existed. And then seeing that door begin to open in a slow, monumental sweep, receding with all the ponderous labor of a clock’s barely budging hands. Another hand also moved with a monstrous languor, as it reached out and laid itself upon me. Then her face looked into mine, and the last thing I remember is that great, gaping smile, and the words: “Merry Christmas, Old Jack!”
Oh, I’ll never forget the look on his face when I said these words. I had him at last, him and his every thought, all the pretty pictures of his mind. Those weeping demons, those souls forever lost to happiness, came out of the fog and took away his body. He was one of them now, crying like a baby! But I have kept the best part, all his beautiful memories, all those lovely times we had—the children, the presents, the colors of those nights! Anywho, they are mine now. Tell us of those years, Old Jack, the years that were never yours. They were always mine, and now I have them to play with like toys according to my will. Oh, how nice, how nice and lovely to have my little home. How nice and lovely to live in a land where it’s always dead with darkness, and where it’s always alive with lights! And where it will always, forever after, be just like Christmas Eve.
The Lost Art
of Twilight
I HAVE painted it, tried to at least. Oiled it, watercolored it, smeared it upon a mirror which I positioned to rekindle the glow of the real thing. And always in the abstract. Never actual sinking suns in spring, autumn, winter skies; never a sepia light descending over the trite horizon of a lake, not even the particular lake I like to view from the great terrace of my massive old mansion. But these Twilights of mine were not merely abstraction, which after all is just a matter of technique, a method for keeping out the riff-raff of the real world. Other painterly abstractionists may claim that nothing is represented by their canvasses, and probably nothing is: a streak of iodine red is just a streak of iodine red, a patch of flat black equals a patch of flat black. But pure color, pure light, pure lines and their rhythms, pure form in general all means much more than that. The others have only seen their dramas of shape and shade; I—and it is impossible to insist on this too strenuously—I have been there. And my twilight abstractions did in fact represent some reality, somewhere, sometime: a zone formed by palaces of soft and sullen color standing beside seas of scintillating pattern and beneath sadly radiant skies; a zone in which the visitor himself is transformed into a formal essence, a luminous presence, fr
ee of substance—a citizen of the abstract. And a zone (I cannot sufficiently amplify my despair on this point, so I will not try) that I will never know again.
Only a few weeks ago I was sitting out on the terrace, watching the early autumn sun droop into the above-mentioned lake, talking to Aunt T. Her heels clomped with a pleasing hollowness on drab flagstones. Silver-haired, she was attired in a gray suit, a big bow flopping up to her lower chins. In her left hand was a long envelope, neatly caesarianed, and in her right hand the letter it had contained, folded in sections like a triptych.
“They want to see you,” she said, gesturing with the letter. “They want to come here.”
“I don’t believe it,” I said and skeptically turned in my chair to watch the sunlight stretching in long cathedral-like aisles across the upper and lower levels of the lawn.
“If you would only read the letter,” she insisted.
“It’s in French, no? Can’t read.”
“Now that’s not true, to judge by those books you’re always stacking in the library.”
“Those happen to be art books. I just look at the pictures.”
“You like pictures, Andre?” she asked in her best matronly ironic tone. “I have a picture for you. Here it is: they are going to be allowed to come here and stay with us as long as they like. There’s a family of them, two children and the letter also mentions an unmarried sister. They’re travelling all the way from Aix-en-Provence to visit America, and while on their trip they want to see their only living blood relation here. Do you understand this picture? They know who you are and, more to the point, where you are.”
“I’m surprised they would want to, since they’re the ones—”
“No, they’re not. They’re from your father’s side of the family. The Duvals,” she explained. “They do know all about you but say,” Aunt T. here consulted the letter for a moment, “that they are sans préjugé.”
“The generosity of such creatures freezes my blood. Phenomenal scum. Twenty years ago these people do what they did to my mother, and now they have the gall, the gall, to say they aren’t prejudiced against me.”
Aunt T. gave me a warning hrumph to silence myself, for just then Rops walked out onto the terrace bearing a tray with a slender glass set upon it. I dubbed him Rops because he, as much as his artistic namesake, never failed to give me the charnel house creeps.
He cadavered over to Aunt T. and served her her afternoon cocktail.
“Thank you,” she said, taking the glass of cloudy stuff.
“Anything for you, sir?” he asked, now holding the tray over his chest like a silver shield.
“Ever see me have a drink, Rops,” I asked back. “Ever see me—”
“Andre, behave. That’ll be all, thank you.”
Rops left our sight in a few bony strides. “You can continue your rant now,” said Aunt T. graciously.
“I’m through. You know how I feel,” I replied and then looked away toward the lake, drinking in the dim mood of the twilight in the absence of normal refreshment.
“Yes, I do know how you feel, and you’ve always been wrong. You’ve always had these romantic ideas of how you and your mother, rest her soul, have been the victims of some monstrous injustice. But nothing is the way you like to think it is. They were not backward peasants who, we should say, saved your mother. They were wealthy, sophisticated members of her own family. And they were not superstitious, because what they believed about your mother was the truth.”
“True or not,” I argued, “they believed the unbelieveable—they acted on it—and that I call superstition. What reason could they possibly—”
“What reason! I have to say that at the time you were in no position to judge reasons, considering that we knew you only as a slight swelling inside your mother’s body. But I was actually there. I saw the ‘new friends’ she had made, that ‘aristocracy of blood,’ as she called it, in contrast to her own people’s hard-earned wealth. But I don’t judge her, I never have. After all, she had just lost her husband—your father was a good man and it’s a shame you never knew him—and then to be carrying his child, the child of a dead man... She was frightened, confused, and she ran back to her family and her homeland. Who can blame her if she started acting irresponsibly. But it’s a shame what happened, especially for your sake.”
“You are indeed a comfort, Auntie,” I said with now regrettable sarcasm.
“Well, you have my sympathy whether you want it or not. I think I’ve proven that over the years.”
“Indeed you have,” I agreed, and somewhat sincerely. Aunt T. poured the last of her drink down her throat and a little drop she wasn’t aware of dripped from the corner of her mouth, shining in the crepuscular radiance like a pearl.
“When your mother didn’t come home one evening—I should say morning—everyone knew what had happened, but no one said anything. Contrary to your ideas about their superstitiousness, they actually could not bring themselves to believe the truth for some time.”
“It was good of all of you to let me go on developing for a while, even as you were deciding how to best hunt my mother down.”
“I will ignore that remark.”
“I’m sure you will.”
“We did not hunt her down, as you well know. That’s another of your persecution fantasies. She came to us, now didn’t she? Scratching at the windows in the night—”
“You can skip this part, I already—”
“—swelling full as the fullest moon. And that was strange, because you would actually have been considered a dangerously premature birth according to normal schedules; but when we followed your mother back to the mausoleum of the local church, where she lay during the daylights hours, she was carrying the full weight of her pregnancy. The priest was shocked to find what he had living, so to speak, in his own backyard. It was actually he, and not so much any of your mother’s family, who thought we should not allow you to be brought into the world. And it was his hand that ultimately released your mother from the life of her new friends, and immediately afterward she began to deliver, right in the coffin in which she lay. The blood was terrible. If we did—”
“It’s not necessary to—”
“—hunt down your mother, you should be thankful that I was among that party. I had to get you out of the country that very night, back to America. I—”
At that point she could see that I was no longer listening, was gazing with a distracted intensity on the pleasanter anecdotes of the setting sun. When she stopped talking and joined in the view, I said:
“Thank you, Aunt T., for that little bedtime story. I never tire of hearing it.”
“I’m sorry, Andre, but I wanted to remind you of the truth.”
“What can I say? I realize I owe you my life, such as it is.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean the truth of what your mother become and what you now are.”
“I am nothing. Completely harmless.”
“That’s why we must let the Duvals come and stay with us. To show them that the world has nothing to fear from you, because that’s what I believe they’re actually coming to see. That’s the message they’ll carry back to your family in France.”
“You really think that’s why they’re coming?”
“I do. They could make quite a bit of trouble for you, for us.”
I rose from my chair as the shadows of the failing twilight deepened. I went and stood next to Aunt T. against the stone balustrade of the terrace, and whispered:
“Then let them come.”
II
I am an offspring of the dead. I am descended from the deceased. I am the progeny of phantoms. My ancestors are the illustrious multitudes of the defunct, grand and innumerable. My lineage is longer than time. My name is written with embalming fluid in the book of death. A noble name is mine.
In the immediate family, the first to meet his maker was my own maker: he rests in the tomb of the unknown father. But while the man did manage t
o sire me, he breathed his last breath in this world before I drew my first. He was felled by a single stroke, his first and last. In those final moments, so I’m told, his erratic and subtle brainwaves made strange designs across the big green eye of the EEG monitor. The same doctor who told my mother that her husband was no longer among the living also informed her, on the very same day, that she was pregnant. Nor was this the only poignant coincidence in the lives of my parents. Both of them belonged to wealthy families from Aix-en-Provence in southern France. However, their first meeting took place not in the old country but in the new, at the American university they each happened to be attending. And so two neighbors crossed a cold ocean to come together in a mandatory science course. When they compared notes on their common backgrounds, they knew it was destiny at work. They fell in love with each other and with their new homeland. The couple later moved into a rich and prestigious suburb (which I will decline to mention by name or state, since I still reside there and, for reasons that will eventually become apparent, must do so discreetly). For years the couple lived in contentment, and then my immediate male forbear died just in time for fatherhood, becoming the appropriate parent for his son-to-be.
Offspring of the dead.
But surely, one might protest, I was born of a living mother; surely upon arrival in this world I turned and gazed into a pair of glossy maternal eyes. Not so, as I think is evident from my earlier conversation with dear Aunt T. Widowed and pregnant, my mother had fled back to Aix, to the comfort of family estates and secluded living. But more on this in a moment. Meanwhile I can no longer suppress the urge to say a few things about my ancestral hometown.
Aix-en-Provence, where I was born but never lived, has many personal, though necessarily second-hand associations for me. However, it is not just a connection between Aix and my own life that maintains such a powerful grip on my imagination, a lifelong idée fixe which actually has more to do with a few unrelated facts in the history of the region. Two pieces of historical data, to be exact. Separate centuries, indeed epochs, play host to these data, and they likewise exist in entirely different realms of mood, worlds apart in implication. Nevertheless, from a certain point of view they can impress one as inseparable opposites. The first one is as follows: in the seventeenth century there occurred the spiritual possession by divers demons of the nuns belonging to the Ursuline convent at Aix. Excommunication was soon in coming for the tragic sisters, who had been seduced into assorted blasphemies by the like of Gresil, Sonnillon, and Verin. De Plancy’s Dictionnaire infernal respectively characterizes these demons, in the words of an unknown translator, as “the one who glistens horribly like a rainbow of insects; the one who quivers in a horrible manner; and the one who moves with a particular creeping motion.” There also exist engravings of these kinetically and chromatically weird beings, unfortunately static and in black and white. Can you believe it? What people are these—so stupid and profound—that they could devote themselves to such nonsense? Who can fathom the science of superstition? (For, as an evil poet once scribbled, superstition is the reservoir of all truths.) This, then, is one side of my imaginary Aix. The other side, and the second historical datum I offer, is simply the birth in 1839 of Aix’s most prominent citizen: Cezanne. His figure haunts the landscape of my brain, wandering about the Provençal countryside in search of his pretty pictures.
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