Old Epzebiah Phloggett the owner of Phlogget Hill Castle–Snake Hill Castle it eventually became, because of the overabundance of small snakes and garter snakes to be found on that hill–little Tom Sawyers of early Lowell pre Civil War went angling up that hill from the old Colonial slums of Prince Street or Worthen where Whistler was born, found the snakes, renamed the hill– Phloggett died in solitude and black loneliness in the primordial castle … some ghastly thing was buried with him. It was years later the cool lake of the basin was rippled by the oars of the Thoreau brothers, and Henry himself up-glanced the Castle with a snort so profound with contempt he never wrote it–besides, his eye was in the water lily, his hand was on the Upanishads–
For a very real snaky reason the unnamably evil owner of the Castle died–of snakebite. Buried no one knew where —derelict castle gooked alone.
Phloggett had sold Black Ivory to the Kings.
In the 19th century it was bought from some firm in Lynn by a landed family from Lynn, contemptuous of the manufacturing gentry but forced to face the early mills across the water; it became their summer place. Oil paintings were hung on the walls, in niches, family portraits, the fireplace roared, the genteel sons stared at the Merrimac with after dinner sherries–from the sun-red west balcony in March dusks, and were bored. Post chaises couldn’t make it to the Castle, bad road–so finally the family got bored–and then the sicknesses began, they all died of something or other. It began to be realized the Castle was never meant for human occupation, it had a hex. The family (Reeves of Lynn) (they’d renamed it Reeves Castle) packed and got out, depleted–the mother, a daughter and three sons dead, one an infant–all of them had been on a summer at the Lowell Castle–the father and his remnant son went to Lynn, got moldered with Hawthorne’s bones nearabouts–
And the Castle was a derelict heap without windows and full of bats and kidcrap flaps for a hundred years.
In 1921 it was bought up by the only kind of person who would want it. Bought up cheap, dusty records in Lynn had been eaten by termites, with seals and ribbons collapsing–only the land was good. (But full of snakes.) Bought up by Emilia St. Claire, a dotty Isadora Duncan woman in a white cult robe with roadsters from Boston on weekends–renamed it Transcendenta she did
Transcendental!
Transcendenta!
We shall dance
A mad cadenza!
Mwee hee hee ha ha, Doctor Sax was ready for them all-
One clear Saturday morning the citizens of Lowell saw the mad Miss St. Claire (a terribly rich woman with a house in Cuba and an apartment house in St. Petersburg, Russia, where her mother had stayed on after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution—) wandering in the marble-statued gardens of the castle grounds, a mad sight to see, pissing off rocks on the heights around the valley little boys could see her, a white dot moving in the distant yard– Bottles of whiskey were found in the yard by little boys who played hookey to explore the Castle Grounds and play blackjack in a shitty bay window. One night long ago, in the thirties, in the height of the Depression a young man who was walking home from the mills at midnight, down by the canal at Aiken near Cheever in Little Canada, headed home to Pawtucketville to a wretched furnished room over the Textile Lunch (name was Amadeus Baroque) saw a curlicueing yellow sheaf of papers sliding in the coldmoon January wind of the French Canuck ruts in frozen mud so like Russia, by creaking saloon signs, grit winds, canal frozen solid– What would anybody do seeing this thing, it was though it talked and begged to be picked up the way it sidled to him like a scorpion–with its dry sheaves crack-a-lak–a rustling clink-dry voice in the winter solitudes of bitter Human North–he picked it up with his fingertips, he stooped to pluck it in his bearish coat, he saw it had writing on it
Doctor Sax, AN ACCOUNT OF HIS ADVENTURE WITH THE HUMAN INHABITANTS OF SNAKE CASTLE-Written & Arrang’d by Adolphus Asher Ghoulens, With a Hint Contain’d of Things Which Have Not Yet Seen Their End
-he briefly had time to read that ghoulish title, and under-tucked the eerie manuscript which he’d plucked from tenemental coldnorth night of desolation like the Lamb is plucked from black hills by the Grace of the Lord, and went home with it.
Arriving there, he unfurled his snaky mysteries–there had already come a hunch to this intelligent young mill-worker that satisfied his taste for ambition. He did not know then that he held in his hands the only existing piece of writing from the pen of Doctor Sax, who confined himself to alchemies and outcries as a rule–this bit of foddle wildwawp had been briefly sketched with quill feather in his underground forge-works and red sleep-hole (under a hermit of ark shack on the Dracut Tigers road, he had a stonewall around, a fence, a garden with vegetables and herbs, a good big dog, and a scraggly single pine)—on a night when drunk–after a visit for a poker game from Old Bull Balloon of Butte and Boaz the caretaker of Snake Hill Castle who’d stayed on long after Miss St. Claire had departed from the Castle forever—(in the manuscript Boaz is the butler, Miss St. Claire’s butler, it shows how Sax met Boaz for the first time). Old Bull Balloon incidentally came once a year for a game with Sax, Bull traveled a lot–the game was always held in Doc Sax’s shack in Dracut Tigers road–that is, in the underground room, where the giant black cat guarded the laboratory secrets of the doctor–
This was the story, on yellowed blotchy papers with rusty staples and stained with winter, garbage, and sand shrouds–Baroque read and laughed (Doctor Sax was no sophisticated writer):—
Emilia St. Claire was a woman of whimsy; in this she was a tyrant, indeed a lovable tyrant. She could afford to be a tyrant for she was rich. Her family had left her millions. She had a chateau in France (at most, she had a dozen chateaux in Europe); she had a mansion in New York City on Riverside Drive; a villa in Italy overlooking Genoa; it was rumored she had a marble retreat on an isle near Crete. (But this is not certain.)
Her whimsy demanded the baroque, the unusual, often the weird, sometimes even the perverted; she had seen too much to be satisfied with the ordinary. Like Isadora Duncan, she wept for the Russian peasant and conducted Oriental salons in her parlours.
Emilia St. Claire did not care for New England, not in any overbearing sense, but there lived in Boston (the Hub of Culture) a clique of her friends who were at all odds some of the most interesting people in the entire world. For this reason, when Emilia St. Claire returned from Athens one March in 1922, she went directly to her place in New England from Pier 42 in New York, driven by her chauffeur Dmitri (an Irishman from Chicago). The “place” was a turreted, all-stone mansion situated on a hill in the northern part of Massachusetts; on clear days, one could gaze from the northern wings and see the Merrimac River winding down from New Hampshire. Emilia St. Claire was not too fond of her newly-acquired New England haven, but she had grown a bit weary of the unusual and had decided to come there for a little of the healthy, robust New England weather that is famous the world over. March, in New England, is like a gust of something raw and moist and feverish; there is the heavy, pungent thaw of dark muds; above, pale clouds, dark clouds flee across the ghostly heavens in terror. March is terror!
Emilia St. Claire, seated in her morning room, drank the tea which had been fetched her by the tall young butler Boaz and smiled at the scene before her eyes, the torn, gaping skies, the steaming marshes, the birch, the bent spruces. She thought rather fondly of the name she had given to her New England retreat: ‘Transcendenta/’
“Transcendenta in the gray morning,” mused Emilia St. Claire to herself, sipping the tea.
Transcendental Transcendental
We shall dance a mad cadenzal
The unusuall Hal Doctor Sax would certainly provide her with that!
Doctor Sax lived in a wooden shack behind the hill upon which reposed the noble bulk of Trancendenta which was originally Reeves Castle. If one were to approach·the shack from the back, from the side, from the front–nothing would be revealed. The shack was as square as a perfect block; it suggested nothing. In the yard were r
ows of vegetables and strange herbs. A tall, tall pine stood in the front. There was no fence; weeds, millions of weeds stretched along the property of Doctor Sax. (Was it his? No one knows.) March nights, the mist would rise and completely obliterate the shack, leaving only the arched rib of the pine protruding above, nodding sadly in the unholy weather. If one were to approach the shack, Ahl there now a light glowing in one of the two windows, with reddish smoky look that lightl Should we approach and gaze within? What vials, what skull heads, what stacks of ancient paper, what red-eyed cats, what haze of what eerie smoke! Horrors, no, we shall leave the discovery to … Emilia St. Claire.
After a few days telephoning and writing, friends began to drift into Transcendenta to be hosted by the fabulous Miss St. Claire. Dark-eyed young dramatic students roved the rooms, garlanded amongst their wild black locks of hair with New England flowers. Strange young women in slacks lounged on the divans and indolently provided resumées of latest Art for Emilia St. Claire. One was a poet; the other a pianist. One was an artist; the other a sculptor. There, now, in the living room, an interpretative dancer! There now, in the pantry (devouring cold chicken) —a celebrated ballet impresario. Now, coming up the drive in a roadster, a drama critic, a composer, and their mistresses. Oh! there’s Polly Ryan! (Have you met Polly? She wears Bohemian dresses, her mascara is applied for deft mystery, she insults everyone, she is a dear.) Tall, swaying Paul (so tall he sways) with his long hands that speak of the stage (the hands! the hands transparent!); the torch singer from Paris with three of her men, one a naive pickpocket they say; the curious young student from Boston College who has been lured by the glitter of the weekend and perhaps leisure and good food and a bit of time for study (Roger dragged him along–Roger thought he was so virile, so self-sufficient!). Soon now, the household will be complete. Where Emilia St. Claire goes, there, by the grace of God, go nonconformists! the intellectuals! the rebels! the gay barbarians! the dadaists! the members of the “set”!
“Let’s be gay!” sang Emilia St. Claire. “I want you all to be frightfully mad! I feel so the need for something different!”
They all proceeded to be gay, mad, different. The interpretative dancer rushed upstairs to don her Thousand-and-One Nights dancing regalia. Sergei’s beautiful hands, at the keyboard, drew forth the enchantment of a Zaggus suite. An evil Gidean in bored tones described his recent experience with the Monster of the Congo and an angelic Damascan waif in Sadi-bel-Abi: with razors and ropes. Polly insulted the young Boston College student: “Really, do you study engineering? I mean really?”
“Yes!” smiled the B.C. lad (while Roger beamed). “I’m studying for a fellowship at M.I.T. I brought some of my calculus homework up here to db a little work … ha! ha! ha! … l hope l can find time to study. Do you go to school?”
“And do you also study Aquinas? I mean, really really?”
“Sure! Ha ha!”
Polly turned away.
“Ha ha!” cried the B.C. student, his voice breaking on the last “ha.” Roger turned on Polly and hissed very much like an adder:
“You lascivious bitch!”
“Oh really Roger don’t hurl your effeminate fury at me,” complained Polly wearily.
Emilia St. Claire laughed gayly.
“You Bostonians,” she whispered raptly. “You impossible, wonderful people.”
The interpretative dancer entered the room and began to sway her nude hips while little bells tinkled in her hands. She danced, she danced! Soon, sweat was pouring from her flesh like lust. They all watched intently. A foul odor filled the room; smoke, liquers, lust, perfumes, incense from the jade Buddhas. Boaz the butler peered from behind a curtain and watched. There was no sound except the little tinkling bells, the sandaled feet, and the heavy breathing.
The East! the East! they thought. Wherefore? Tinkle, tinkle.
But outside, a mad moon peered from time to time through the ripping clouds. The wind moaned, the spruces creaked, all things were in their dark vestment. A figure approached along the drive. It crossed the lawn and neared the window. It peered inside.
Transcendenta! Transcendenta!
We shall dance a mad cadenzal
Polly roamed towards the window with a Fatima held tenderly between white, frail fingers. She said to Joyce: “My dear, when are you going to introduce that ‘Interesting’ friend of yours?”
“Oh Polly,” sang Joyce, her dark eyes glittering, “you’ll be simply fascinated. He has such poise!”
“What does he do?”—behind Polly’s words the room gurgled with conversation, lilted with little laughter; glasses tinkled, the piano tinkled, voices tinkled.
“Oh, he does nothing,” said Joyce airily, “he just does nothing.”
“But does he really?” intoned Polly indolently, and she walked to the window slowly; the eyes of the men, from their chairs, couches, standing near the fireplace, near the punch bowl, followed the slow coil of her lavish body, the full flesh that seemed to press for release from the tight velvet gown, they watched her creamy back with its sensual cleft down towards a round bursting hind (like that of a great cow abloom from summers of heavy fodder); they took note of the shoulders like two gleaming ivories, of the breastbone like the plains of snow before the mount; they watched. Their eyes gleamed. Polly’s limbs rolled lazily. She stopped at the window to gaze out at the wild night.
She screamed!
He he he he! He he he he hel She screams! She screams!
Doctor Sax was at the window. His eyes were emerald green, and they flashed at the sight of her. They lit with delight at her scream. When she fainted to the floor, Doctor Sax hurled his cape around his shoulder and glided swiftly to the front entrance. He wore a large slouch hat the very color of the night. In an instant he was ringing furiously at the door, rapping the oak panels with his knotty cane.
They all thought Polly had taken a fit of some sort (she was apoplectic, you know); they carried her to the divan and brought water. Boaz yawned involuntarily and went to the door, his long black shoes creaking along the gloomy carpeted hall. He opened the door with a careful flunkey’s flourish.
A foul wind, abreath with the rank mud of the marshes, poured into the musty hallway. The caped figure stood.
Boaz screamed like a woman. Doctor Sax entered snarling.
“I am Doctor Sax!” he howled at the butler. “I shall announce myself!”
Doctor Sax swept into the salon, his cape flowing and looping, his slouch hat half concealing a secret, malevolent leer. His countenance was publish, he had red hair and red eyebrows, his eyes were fierce green and they flashed with joy. He was very tall. He swept his black cane at all of them and emitted a happy growl. “Greetings!” he howled. “Greetings to one and all! May I join your charming company, eh? May I join you all?”
Transcendenta! Transcendenta!
We shall dance a mad cadenza!
Screams! Screams! Screaming, the women fell, one by one! Ha ha! They fell, they fell! The men paled, some of them buckled to the floor, some stood transfixed with horrors. Emilia St. Claire swooned upon the divan! Hee hee hee! Hee hee hee hee hee!
Doctor Sax swept to the decanter and poured himself a drink of Napoleon brandy. He whirled and faced them all; only a few men stood trembling.
“What ails thee, my spright?” demanded Sax approaching one of the more stalwart survivors. The latter toppled over and swooned with a groan. Doctor Sax looked around, his green eyes flashing beams of venomous light.
He was amused, nay delighted!
“Interesting ye be, pale neighbors, so surely can’st begrudge me wee hospitality!” No answer. “Eh?” he demanded. “EH?” he howled, turning to the young butler Boaz who had staggered after him down the hall and was clutching to shrouded curtains. But a malignant smile from Doctor Sax sent this young man fleeing up the hallway and out into the insane March night with his long black shoes flapping.