Songs of a Dead Dreamer and Grimscribe
I signaled the windows to open onto the night, and, very slowly, they did. His childlike laughter had now turned to tears, but they would soon run dry, I knew this. At last we would be free to live magically, timelessly beyond the pull of the earth. The windows opened wide over the city below and, in a manner of speaking, the profound blackness above welcomed us.
I had never tried this before.
But when the time came, I found it all so easy.
DREAMS FOR INSOMNIACS
THE CHRISTMAS EVES OF AUNT ELISE
A TALE OF POSSESSION IN OLD GROSSE POINTE
We pronounced her name with a distinct “Z” sound—Remember, Jack, remember—the way some people slur Missus into Mizzuz. It was at her home in Grosse Pointe that she insisted our family, both its wealthy and its unwealthy sides, celebrate each Christmas Eve in a style that exuded the traditional, the old-fashioned, the antique. Actually, Aunt Elise constituted the wealthy side of the family all on her own. Her husband had died many years before, leaving his wife a prosperous real estate business and no children. Not surprisingly, Aunt Elise undertook the management of the firm with admirable success, perpetuating our heirless uncle’s family name on “for sale” signs planted on front lawns in three states. But what was Uncle’s first name, a young nephew or niece sometimes wondered. Or, as it was more than once put by one of us children: “Where’s Uncle Elise?” To which the rest of us answered in unison: “He’s at his ease,” a response we learned from none other than our widowed aunt herself.
Aunt Elise was without husband or offspring of her own, true enough. But she loved all the ferment of big families, and every holiday season she possessed as much in blood relations as she did in her tangible and intangible assets and investments. Nevertheless, she was not the conspicuously consuming type of rich bitch. Her house was something of an Elizabethan country manor in style while remaining modest, even relatively miniature, in its mass. It fit very nicely—when it existed—into a claustrophobic cluster of trees on some corner acreage a few steps from Lake Shore Drive, profiling rather than facing the lake itself. A rather dull exterior of soot-gray stones somewhat camouflaged the old place in its woodland hideaway, until one caught sight of its diamond-paned windows and realized that a house in fact existed where before there seemed to be only shadowed vacancy.
Around Christmastime the many-faceted windows of my aunt’s residence took on a candied glaze in the pink, blue, green, and other-colored lights strung about their perimeters. More often in the old days—Remember them, Jack—a thick December fog rolled off the not-yet-frozen lake and those kaleidoscopic windows would throw their spectrums into the softening haze. This, to my child’s senses, was the image and atmosphere defining the winter holiday: a serene congregation of colors that for a time turned our everyday world into one where mysteries abounded. This was the celebration, this was the festival. Why did we leave it all behind us, leave it outside? Every Christmas Eve of my childhood, as I was guided up the winding front walk toward my aunt’s house, a parent’s hand in each of mine, I always stopped short, pulling Mom and Dad back like a couple of runaway horses, and for a brief, futile moment refused to go inside.
After the first Christmas Eve I can recall—chronologically my fifth—I knew what happened inside the house, and year after year there was little change either in the substance or surface details of the program. For those from large families, this scene is a little too familiar to bother describing. Perhaps even lifelong orphans are jaded to it. Still, there are others for whom depictions of unusual uncles, loveable grandparents, and a common run of cousins will always be fresh and dear; those who delight in multiple generations of characters crowding the page, who are warmed by the feel of their paper flesh. I tell you they share this temper with my Aunt Elise, and her spirit is in them.
For the duration of these Christmas assemblies, my aunt always occupied the main room of her house. This room I never saw except as a fantasy of ornamentation, a hallucinatorium in holiday dress. Right now I can only hope to portray a few of its highlights. First of all holly, both fresh and artificial, hung down from wherever it was possible to hang—the frames of paintings, the stained-wood shelves of a thousand gewgaws, even the velvety embossed pattern of the wallpaper itself, intertwining with its swirls and flourishes, if memory serves. And from the fixtures above, including a chandelier delicately sugared with tiny Italian lights, down came gardens of mistletoe. The huge fireplace blazed with a festive inferno, and before its cinder-spitting hearth was a protective screen, at either end of which stood a pair of thick brass posts. And slipped over the crown of each post was a sock-puppet Santa, its mittens outstretched in readiness to give someone a tiny, angular hug.
In the corner of the main room, the one beside the front window, a plump evergreen was somewhere hidden beneath every imaginable type of dangling, roping, or blinking decoration, as well as being dolled up with silly bows in pastel shades, satiny bows lovingly tied by human hands. The same hands also did their work on the presents beneath the tree, and year after year these seemed, like everything else in the room, to be in exactly the same place, as if the gifts of last Christmas had never been opened, quickening in me the nightmarish sense of a ritual forever reenacted without hope of escape. (Somehow I am still possessed by this same feeling of entrapment.) My own present was always at the back of that horde of packages, almost against the wall behind the tree. It was tied up with a pale purple ribbon and covered with pale blue wrapping paper upon which little bears in infants’ sleeping gowns dreamed of more pale blue presents which, instead of more bears, had little boys dreaming upon them. I spent much of a given Christmas Eve sitting near this gift of mine, mostly to find refuge from the others rather than to wonder at what was inside. It was always something in the way of underwear, nightwear, or socks, never the nameless marvel which I fervently hoped to receive from my obscenely well-heeled aunt. Nobody seemed to mind that I sat on the other side of the room from where most of them congregated to talk or sing carols to the music of an ancient organ, which Aunt Elise played with her back to her audience, and to me.
Slee—eep in heav—enly peace.
“That was very good,” she said without turning around. As usual, the sound of her voice led you to expect that any moment she would clear her throat of some sticky stuff which was clinging to its insides. Instead she switched off the electric organ, after which gesture some of the gathering, dismissed, left for other parts of the house.
“We didn’t hear Old Jack singing with us,” she said, turning to look across the room where I was seated in a large chair beside a fogged window. On that occasion I was about twenty or twenty-one, home from school for Christmas. I had drunk quite a bit of Aunt Elise’s holiday punch, and felt like answering: “Who cares if you didn’t hear Old Jack singing, you old bat?” But instead I simply stared her way, drunkenly taking in her visage for the family scrapbook of my memory: tight-haired head (like combed wires), calm eyes of someone in an old portrait (someone long gone), high cheekbones highly colored (less rosily than like a rash), and the prominent choppers of a horse charging out of nowhere in a dream. I had no worry about my future ability to remember these features, even though I had vowed this would be the last Christmas Eve I would view them. So I could afford to be tranquil in the face of Aunt Elise’s taunts that evening. In any case, further confrontation between the two of us was aborted when some of the children began clamoring for one of their aunt’s stories. “And this time a true story, Auntie. One that really happened.”
“All right,” she answered, adding that “maybe Old Jack would like to come over and sit with us.”
“Too old for that, thank you. Besides, I can hear you just fine from—”
“Well,” she began before I’d finished, “let me think a moment. There are so many, so many. Anywho, here’s one of them. This happened before any of you were born, a few winters after I moved into this neighborhood with your uncl
e. I don’t know if you ever noticed, but a little ways down the street there’s an empty lot where there should be, used to be, a house. You can see it from the front window over there,” she said, pointing to the window beside my chair. I let my eyes follow her finger out that window and through the fog witnessed the empty lot of her story.
“There it once stood, a beautiful old house much bigger than this one. In that house lived a very old man who never went out and who never invited anyone to visit him, at least no one I ever noticed. And after the old man died, what do you think happened to the house?”
“It disappeared,” answered some of the children, jumping the gun.
“In a way, I suppose it did disappear. Actually what happened was that some men came and tore the house down brick by brick. I think the old man who lived there must have been very mean to want that to happen to his house after he died.”
“How do you know he wanted it?” I interjected, trying to spoil her assumption.
“What other sensible explanation is there?” Aunt Elise answered. “Anywho,” she went on, “I think that the old man just couldn’t stand the thought of anyone else living in the house and being happy there, because surely he wasn’t. But maybe, just maybe, he had his house torn down for another reason,” said Aunt Elise, drawing out these last words to suspenseful effect. The children sitting cross-legged before her now listened with a new intentness, while the crackling logs seemed to start up a little more noisily in the fireplace.
“Maybe by destroying his house, making it disappear, the old man thought he was taking it with him into the other world. People who have lived alone for a very long time often think and do very strange things,” she emphasized, though I’m sure no one except me thought to apply this final statement to the storyteller herself. (Tell everything, Jack.) She went on:
“Now what would lead a person to such conclusions about the old man, you may wonder? Did something strange happen with him and his house after both of them were gone? Well, the answer is yes, something did happen. And I’m going to tell you just what it was.
“One night—a foggy winter’s night like this one, oh my little children—someone came walking down this exact street and paused at the property line of the house of the old man who was now dead. This someone was a young man whom many people had seen wandering around here off and on for some years. I myself, I tell you, once confronted him and asked him what business he had with us and with our homes, because that’s what he seemed most interested in. Anywho, this young man called himself an an-tee-quarian, and he said he was very interested in old things, particularly old houses. And he had a very particular interest in the house of that strange old man. A number of times he had asked him if he could look around inside, but the old man always refused. Most of the time the house was dark as though no one was home, even if someone always was.
“So you can imagine the young man’s bewilderment when on that winter’s night what he saw was not a dark house where it seemed no one was inside, but a place all lit up with bright Christmas lights shining through the fog. Could this be the old man’s house, decorated so nice and cheerful 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. So, one more time, the young man thought he would try his luck and maybe get to see the inside of 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 so that his caller could come in. 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,” I interrupted.
“Aunt Elise knows,” asserted one of my little cousins just to shut me up. And when my aunt cast a glance at me, it seemed for a moment that she really did know. Then she continued her true story.
“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. 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. Naturally, this startled the young man, who jumped up from his chair and nervously 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 any number of different places, the owner of the house didn’t seem to be anywhere that the young man investigated. So the antiquarian finally decided just to leave without saying good-bye or thank you or anything like that.
“But he didn’t get as far as the 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. Well, did you like that story, children?”
I felt tired, more tired than I’d ever been in my life. I barely had the will or the strength to push myself out of the chair into which I’d sunk down so deep. How slowly I trudged past faces that seemed far off in the distance. Where was I going? Was I in want of another drink? Did I desire another dainty from the table spread with Christmas treats? What was it that was calling me away from that room?
No time seemed to have passed, but when I came to myself 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. As it happened, though, I did finally see something. What I saw was a cluster of Christmas lights, their 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 hazy wonder, which had transported the imagination of my childhood self, now strike me with such terror? These were not the colors I had loved; this could not be the house. Yet it was, for there at the window stood its owner, and the sight of her thin smiling face for some reason was not right.
Then I remembered: Aunt Elise was long dead and her house, at the instruction of her will, had been dismantled brick by brick.
“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 an elder member of the family who had nodded off in his chair. It was Christmas Eve, and I had had a little too much to drink.
“We’re gonna sing carols, Uncle Jack,” said the voices. 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. (I liked their metallic timbre because it was in no way reminiscent of the rich, rotting vibrations of the church organ Aunt Elise played on Christmas Eves long past.) Foregoing all rituals of departure, I slipped quietly out the back door in the kitchen.
I left that Christmas Eve get-together as if I had an appointment to keep, one of long standing whose import I never knew or had forgotten. So many things I can remember from years gone by—and easily enough because I have led such an uneventful and solitar
y existence—but I cannot remember what happened next that evening. My mind was not at its best, and the dream I had earlier must have carried over into one I had when I went to sleep at home, though I do not recall doing that either. The one thing I do remember, as if it happened while I was still awake and not dreaming, was standing before the door of a house that no longer existed, a door that opened in a slow, weighty sweep. Then a hand reached out and laid itself upon me. What horror I felt as I saw that great, gaping smile and heard the words: “Merry Christmas, Old Jack!”
Oh, how good it was to see the old boy when he came to me at last. He had grown old but never grew up. And finally I had him, him and his every thought, all the pretty pictures of his mind. Those weeping demons, souls forever lost, came out of the fog and took away his body. He was one of them now. 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 I have now taken from you—the years I can play with as I wish, like a child with his toys. Oh, how nice, how nice and lovely to be settled in a world where it’s always dead with darkness and always alive with lights! And where it will always, forever after, be Christmas Eve.
THE LOST ART OF TWILIGHT
I
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 done in the abstract merely for the sake of keeping out the riff-raff of the real world. Other painterly abstractionists may claim that nothing in life is represented by their canvases—that a streak of iodine red is just a streak of iodine red, a spattering of flat black equals a spattering of flat black. Yet sheer color, sheer rhythms of line and masses of structure, sheer composition in general meant more to me 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. My twilight abstractions did in fact represent some reality: a zone composed of palaces of soft and sullen colors standing beside seas of scintillating pattern and beneath sadly radiant patches of sky, a zone where the observer is a formal presence, an impalpable essence, free of carnal substance—a denizen of the abstract. But that is just a memory to me now. What I thought would last forever was lost in the blink of an eye.