THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 4 page

When his old girlfriend Elizabeth called from New York, he talked to her until he actually passed out. The next morning she told him he must get psychiatric help. She threatened to drop work and fly out if he didn’t agree. He agreed. But he was lying.

He did not want to confide in anybody. He did not want to describe the new intensity of feeling. He certainly didn’t want to talk about his hands. All he wanted to talk about were the visions, and nobody wanted to hear about that, nobody wanted to hear him talk about the curtain dropping that separated the living from the dead.

After Aunt Viv went to bed, he experimented just a little with the touching power. He could tell a great deal from an object when he allowed himself to handle it slowly; if he asked questions of his power—that is, tried to direct it—he could receive even more. But he did not like the feel of it, of these images flashing through his head. And if there was a reason he had been given this sensitivity, the reason was forgotten along with the vision, and the sense of purpose regarding his return to life.

Stacy brought him books to read about others who had died and come back. Dr. Morris at the hospital had told him of these works—the classic studies of the “near death experience” by Moody, Rawlings, Sabom, and Ring. Fighting the drunkenness, the agitation, the sheer inability to concentrate for any length of time, he forced himself through some of these accounts.

Yes, he knew this! It was all true. He too had risen out of his body, yes, and it was no dream, yes, but he had not seen a beautiful light; he had not been met by dead loved ones; and there had been no unearthly paradise to which he was admitted, full of flowers and beautiful colors. Something altogether different had happened out there. He had been intercepted as it were, appealed to, made to realize that he must perform a very difficult task, that much depended upon it.

Paradise. The only paradise he had ever known was in the city where he’d grown up, the warm sweet place he’d left when he was seventeen, that old great square of some twenty-five-odd city blocks known in New Orleans as the Garden District.

Yes, back there, where it all started. New Orleans which he hadn’t seen since the summer of his seventeenth year. And the funny thing was, that when he considered his life, as drowning men are supposed to do, he thought first and foremost of that long-ago night when, at age six, he had discovered classical music on his grandmother’s back porch, listening in the fragrant dusk to an old tube radio. Four o’clocks glowing in the dark. Cicadas grinding in the trees. His grandfather was smoking a cigar on the step, and then that music came into his life, that heavenly music.

Why had he loved that music so much when nobody around him did? Different from the start, that’s what he’d been. And his mother’s breeding could not account for it. To her all music was noise, she said. Yet he had loved that music so much that he stood there conducting it with a stick, making great sweeping gestures in the dark, humming.

It was in the Irish Channel that they lived, hardworking people, the Currys, and his father was the third generation to inhabit the small double cottage in the long waterfront neighborhood where so many of the Irish had settled. From the great potato famine Michael’s ancestors had fled, packed into the emptied cotton ships on their way back from Liverpool to the American South for the more lucrative cargo.

Into the “wet grave” they’d been dumped, these hungry immigrants, some of them dressed in rags, begging for work, and dying by the hundreds from yellow fever, consumption, and cholera. The survivors had dug the city’s mosquito-infested canals. They had stoked the boilers of the big steamboats. They had loaded cotton onto ships and worked on the railroads. They had become policemen and firemen.

These were tough people, people from whom Michael had inherited his powerful build, his determination. The love of working with his hands had come from them and finally prevailed in spite of years of education.

He’d grown up hearing tales of those early days, of how the Irish workingmen themselves had built the great parish church of St. Alphonsus, dragging the stones from the river, laying the mortar, collecting for the beautiful statues that came from Europe. “We had to outdo the Germans, you see, you know they were building St. Mary’s right across the street. Nothing on earth was going to make us go to Mass with each other.” And that’s why there were two magnificent parish churches instead of one, with Masses being said by the very same staff of priests every morning.

Michael’s grandfather had worked as a policeman on the wharves, where his father had once loaded cotton bales. He took Michael to see the banana boats come in and the thousands of bananas disappearing into the warehouse on the conveyor belts, warning him about the big black snakes that could hide in the banana stalks right until they hung them up in the markets.

Michael’s father was a fire fighter until his death one afternoon in a fire on Tchoupitoulas Street when Michael was seventeen. That had been the turning point of Michael’s life, for by that time his grandparents were gone, and his mother had taken him back with her to the place of her birth, San Francisco.

There was never the slightest doubt in his mind that California had been good to him. The twentieth century had been good to him. He was the first of that old clan ever to earn a college degree, ever to live in the world of books or paintings or fine houses.

But even if his dad had never died, Michael’s life would not have been a fireman’s life. There were things stirring in him that had not ever stirred at all, it seemed, in his forebears.

It wasn’t just the music that summer night. It was the way he loved books from the time he learned to read, how he gobbled up Dickens when he was nine years old, and treasured ever after the novel Great Expectations.

Years later in San Francisco he had given his beloved construction company that name: Great Expectations.

He used to fall into Great Expectations or David Copperfield in the school library where other boys threw spitballs and punched him on the arm and threatened to beat him up if he didn’t stop acting “simple,” the Irish Channel word for someone who did not have the good sense to be hard, and brutal, and disdaining of all things that defy immediate definition.

But nobody ever beat up Michael. He had enough healthy meanness from his father to punish anyone who even tried. Even as a child he was husky and uncommonly strong, a human being for whom physical action, even of a violent sort, was fairly natural. He liked to fight too. And the kids learned to leave him alone, and also he learned to hide his secret soul enough that they forgave him the few slips and generally liked him.

And the walks, what about those long walks that nobody else his age ever took? Even his girlfriends later on never understood. Rita Mae Dwyer laughed at him. Marie Louise said he was nuts. “What do you mean, just walk?” But from the earliest years, he liked to walk, to slip across Magazine Street, the great dividing line between the narrow sunbaked streets where he’d been born and the grand quiet streets of the Garden District.

In the Garden District were the oldest uptown mansions of the city, slumbering behind their massive oaks and broad gardens. There he strolled in silence over the brick sidewalks, hands shoved in his pockets, sometimes whistling, thinking that someday he would have a great house here. He would have a house with white columns on the front and flagstone walks. He would have a grand piano, such as those he glimpsed through long floor-length windows. He would have lace curtains and chandeliers. And he would read Dickens all day long in some cool library where the books went to the ceiling and the bloodred azaleas drowsed beyond the porch railings.

He felt like Dickens’s hero, the young Pip, glimpsing what he knew he must possess and being so very far from ever having it.

But in this love of walking he was not entirely alone, for his mother had loved to take long walks, too, and perhaps it was one of the few very significant gifts she had given him.

Houses she had understood and loved, just as he always would. And when he was very small, she had brought him to this quiet sanctuary of old homes, pointing out to him her favorite spots, and the great smooth lawns often half concealed by the camellia shrubs. She had taught him to listen to the cry of the birds in the oaks, to the music of hidden fountains.

There was one dark house she dearly loved which he would never forget, a long grim town house affair with a great bougainvillea vine spilling over its side porches. And often when they passed, Michael saw a curious and solitary man standing alone among the high unkempt shrubs, far to the back of the neglected garden. He seemed lost in the tumbling, tangled green, this man, blending with the shadowy foliage so completely that another passerby might not have noticed him.

In fact, Michael and his mother had played a little game in those early years about the man. She would always say that she couldn’t see him. “But he’s there, Mom,” Michael would reply, and she would say, “All right, Michael, tell me what he looks like.”

“Well, he has brown hair and brown eyes, and he’s very dressed up, as if he’s going to a party. But he’s watching us, Mom, and I don’t think we should stand here and stare at him.”

“Michael, there is no man,” his mother would say.

“Mom, you’re teasing me.”

But there had been one occasion on which she had seen that man, for certain, and she hadn’t liked him. It wasn’t at the house.

It wasn’t in that ruined garden.

It was at Christmastime when Michael was still very small, and the great crib had just been set up at the side altar of St. Alphonsus Church, with the Baby Jesus in the manger. Michael and his mother had gone up to kneel at the altar rail. How beautiful the life-sized statues of Mary and Joseph; and the Baby Jesus himself, smiling, with his chubby little arms extended. Everywhere it seemed there had been bright lights and the sweet, softening flicker of candles. The church was full of the sound of shuffling feet, of hushed whispers.

Perhaps this had been the first Christmas that Michael could remember. Whatever the case, the man had been there, over in the shadows of the sanctuary, quietly looking on, and when he had seen Michael, he had given him that little smile he always did. His hands were clasped. He wore a suit. His face looked very calm. Altogether he looked the same as he did in the garden on First Street.

“Look, there he is, Mom,” Michael said at once. “That man, the one from the garden.”

Michael’s mother had only glanced at the man and then fearfully away. She’d whispered in Michael’s ear, “Well, don’t stare at him.”

As they left the church, she’d turned to look back once.

“That’s the man in the garden, Mom,” Michael said.

“Whatever are you talking about?” she’d asked. “What garden?”

The next time they’d walked down First Street again, he had seen the man, and he had tried to tell her. But again, she played the game. She had teased him, saying there was no man.

They had laughed. It was all right. It didn’t seem to mean much at the time, though he never forgot it.

Much more significant that Michael and his mother were fast friends, that they always had so much fun together.

In later years, Michael’s mother gave him another gift, the movies she took him to see downtown at the Civic Theater. They would take the streetcar on Saturdays to the matinees. Sissy stuff, Mike, his father would say. Nobody was dragging him into those crazy shows.

Michael knew better than to answer, and as time passed he found a way to smile and shrug it off so that his father left him alone, and left his mother alone too, which meant even more to him. And besides, nothing was going to take away those special Saturday afternoons. Because the foreign movies were like portals into another world, and they filled Michael with unspeakable anguish and happiness.

He never forgot Rebecca and The Red Shoes and The Tales of Hoffman and a film from Italy of the opera Aida. And then there was the wonderful story of the pianist called A Song to Remember. He loved Caesar and Cleopatra with Claude Rains and Vivien Leigh. And The Late George Apley with Ronald Colman, who had the most beautiful voice Michael ever heard in a man.

It was frustrating that he sometimes couldn’t understand these films, that sometimes he couldn’t even follow them. The subtitles invariably went by too fast for him to read; and in the British films, the actors spoke too fast for him to understand their crisp accents.

Sometimes his mother explained things on the way home. They rode the streetcar past their stop and all the way uptown to Carrolton Avenue. It was a good place for them to be alone. And there were the palatial houses of that street to see, the later, often gaudier houses built after the Civil War, not as beautiful as the older Garden District homes, but nevertheless sumptuous to behold and endlessly interesting.

Ah, the quiet pain of those leisurely rides, of wanting so much and understanding so little. He caught the crepe myrtle blossoms now and then with his fingers through the open streetcar window. He dreamed of being Maxim de Winter. He wanted to know the names of the classical pieces he heard on the radio and loved, to be able to understand and recall the unintelligible foreign words spoken by the announcers.

And strangely enough, in the old horror films at the dirty Happy Hour Theater on Magazine Street—his own neighborhood—he often glimpsed the same elegant world and people. There were the same paneled libraries, arched fireplaces, and men in smoking jackets, and graceful soft-spoken females—right along with Frankenstein’s monster or Dracula’s daughter. Dr. Van Helsing was a most elegant guy, and there was the very Claude Rains who had played Caesar at the downtown theater now cackling madly as The Invisible Man.

Try as he might not to do it, Michael came to loathe the Irish Channel. He loved his folks. And he liked his friends well enough. But he hated the double houses, twenty to a block, with tiny front yards and low picket fences, the comer bar with the jukebox playing in the back room and the screen door always slamming, and the fat women in their flowered dresses, smacking their children with belts or naked hands on the street.

He loathed the crowds that shopped on Magazine Street in the late Saturday afternoon. It seemed to him the children always had dirty faces and dirty clothes. The salesgirls behind the counter at the dime store were rude. The pavement stank of rotting beer. There was a stench to the old railroad fiats above the shops where some of his friends, the most unfortunate, lived. The stench was in the old shoe shops and radio repair shops. It was even in the Happy Hour Theater. The stench of Magazine Street. Carpet on the stairs in these old buildings looked and felt like bandages. A layer of dirt overlaid all. His mother would not go to Magazine Street even for a spool of thread. She walked through the Garden District and caught the St. Charles car on the Avenue and went down to Canal Street.

Michael was ashamed of this hate. He was ashamed as Pip had been ashamed of such a hate of his own in Great Expectations. But the more he learned and the more he saw, the more the disdain grew in him.

And it was the people, always the people, who put him off the most. He was ashamed of the harsh accent that marked you as being from the Irish Channel, an accent, they said, which sounded like Brooklyn or Boston or anyplace where the Irish and the Germans settled. “We know you’re from Redemptorist School,” the uptown kids would say. “We can tell by the way you talk.” They meant it contemptuously.

Michael even disliked the nuns, the crude, deep-voiced sisters who smacked the boys whenever they felt like it, who shook them and humiliated them at whim.

In fact, he hated them in particular for something they had done when he was six years old. One little boy, a “troublemaker,” was dragged out of the boys’ first-grade classroom and taken over to the first-grade teacher in the girls’ school. Only later did the class find out that there the boy had been made to stand in the trash basket, crying and red-faced, in front of all the little girls. Over and over the nuns had shoved at him and pushed at him, saying “Get in that trash can; get in it!” The girls had watched and told the boys about it afterwards.

This chilled Michael. He felt a sullen wordless terror that such a thing could happen to him. Because he knew he would never let it happen. He would fight and then his father would whip him, a violence that had always been threatened but never carried out beyond a couple of licks with a strap. In fact, all the violence that he had always sensed simmering around him—in his father, his grandfather, all the men he knew—might rise, like chaos, and drag him down into it. How many times had he seen the kids around him whipped? How many times had he heard his father’s cold, ironic jokes about the whippings his own father had given him? Michael feared it with a horrid, paralyzing speechless fear. He feared the vicious catastrophic intimacy of being hit, being beaten.

So in spite of his general physical restlessness and his stubbornness, he became an angel in school long before he realized that he needed to learn in order to fulfill his dreams. He was the quiet boy, the boy who always did his homework. Fear of ignorance, fear of violence, fear of humiliation drove him as surely as his later ambitions.

But why hadn’t these elements driven anyone else around him? He never knew, but there was no doubt in retrospect that he was from the start a highly adaptable person. That was the key. He learned from what he saw, and changed accordingly.

Neither of his parents had that flexibility. His mother was patient, yes, and kept in check the disgust she felt for the habits of those around her. But she had no dreams, no great plans, no true creative force to her. She never changed. She never did much of anything.

As for Michael’s father, he was a brash and lovable man, a brave fire fighter who won many decorations. He died trying to save lives. That was his nature. But it was his nature, too, to shrink from what he didn’t know or understand. A deep vanity made him feel “small” before those with real education.

“Do your lessons,” he’d say, because that was what he was supposed to say. He never dreamed that Michael was drawing all he could from the parish school, that in the overcrowded classrooms, with the tired, overworked nuns, Michael was actually acquiring a fine education.

For no matter how abysmal the conditions, the nuns taught the children how to read and write very well. Even if they had to hit them to do it. They gave the children a beautiful handwriting. They taught them how to spell. They taught them their arithmetic tables, and they even taught Latin and history and some literature. They kept order among the toughs. And though Michael never stopped hating them, though he would hate them for years after, he had to admit that now and then they did speak in their own varying simple ways about spiritual things, about living a life that mattered.

When Michael was eleven, three things happened which had a rather dramatic effect upon him. The first was a visit from his Aunt Vivian from San Francisco, and the second was an accidental discovery at the public library.

The visit of Aunt Vivian was brief. His mother’s sister came to town on a train. They met her at Union Station. She stayed at the Pontchartrain Hotel on St. Charles, and the evening after her arrival she invited Michael and his mother and father to join her for dinner at the Caribbean Room. This was the fancy dining room in the Pontchartrain Hotel. Michael’s father said no. He wasn’t going into a place like that. Besides, his suit was at the cleaners.

Michael went, the little man, all dressed up, walking through the Garden District with his mother.

The Caribbean Room quite astonished him. It was a near silent, eerie world of candlelight, white tablecloths, and waiters who looked like ghosts, or better yet, they looked like the vampires in the horror movies, with their black jackets and stiff white shirts.

But the true revelation was that Michael’s mother and her sister were entirely at home in this place, laughing softly as they talked, asking the waiter this and that about the turtle soup, the sherry, the white wine they’d have with dinner.

This gave Michael an enhanced respect for his mother. She wasn’t a lady who just put on airs. She really was used to that life. And he understood now why she sometimes cried and said she’d like to go home to San Francisco.

After her sister left, she was sick for days. She lay in bed, refusing everything but wine, which she called her medicine. Michael sat by her, reading to her now and then, getting scared when she didn’t speak for an hour. She got well. She got up, and then life went on.

But Michael often thought of that dinner, of the easy and natural way the two ladies had been together. Often he walked by the Pontchartrain Hotel. He looked with quiet envy at the well-dressed people who stood outside, under the awning, waiting for their taxis or limousines. Was he just greedy to want to live in their world? Wasn’t all that beauty spiritual? He puzzled over so many things. He was bursting with desires to learn, to understand, to possess. Yet he wound up next door in Smith’s Drugstore reading the horror comics.

Then came the accidental discovery at the public library. Michael had only recently learned about the library itself, and the accidental discovery came in stages.

Michael was in the children’s reading room, roaming about, looking for something easy and fun to read when he suddenly saw, open for display on top of a bookcase, a new stiff-backed book on the game of chess—a book that told one how to play it.

Now, chess had always struck Michael as highly romantic. But how he knew of it he couldn’t have told anyone. He’d never seen a chess set in real life. He checked out the book, took it home, and began to read it. His father saw it and laughed. He knew how to play chess, played it all the time, he said, at the firehouse. You couldn’t learn it from a book. That was stupid.

Michael said that he could learn it from the book, he was learning it.

“OK, you learn it,” his father said, “and I’ll play it with you.”

This was a great thing. Another person who knew chess. Maybe they would even buy a chessboard. Michael finished the book in less than a week. He knew chess. For an hour he answered every question his father put to him.

“Well, I don’t believe this,” his father said. “But you know how to play chess. All you need is a chess set.” Michael’s father went downtown. When he returned home, he had a chess set that surpassed all Michael’s visions. It was made up not of symbols—a horse’s head, a castle, a bishop’s cap—but of fully delineated figures. The knight sat upon his horse with its front feet raised; the bishop held his hands in prayer. The queen had long hair beneath her crown. The rook was a castle riding upon the back of an elephant.

Of course it was made of plastic, this thing. It had come from D. H. Holmes department store. But it was so much finer than anything pictured in the book on chess that Michael was overcome by the sight of it. Never mind that his father called the knight “my horse man.” They were playing chess. And thereafter they played often.

But the great accidental discovery was not that Michael’s father knew how to play chess, or that he had the kindness in him to buy such a beautiful set. That was all very well and good. And of course playing chess drew father and son together. But the great accidental discovery was that Michael could absorb something more than stories from books … that they could lead him to something other than painful dreaming and wanting.

He had learned something from a book which others believed must be learned from doing or practice.

He became more courageous in the library after that. He talked to the librarians at the desk. He learned about the “subjects catalog.” And haphazardly and obsessively, he began to research a whole spectrum of subjects.

The first was cars. He found lots of books in the library on cars. He learned all about an engine from the books, and all about makes of cars, and quietly dazzled his father and his grandfather with this knowledge.

Then he looked up fire fighters and fires in the catalog. He read up on the history of the companies that developed in the big cities. He read about the fire engines and ladder trucks and how they were made, and all about great fires in history, such as the Chicago fire, and the Triangle Factory fire, and once again he was able to discuss all this with his father and grandfather.

Michael was thrilled. He felt now that he had great power. And he proceeded to his secret agenda, not confiding this to anyone. Music was his first secret subject.

He chose the most babyfied books at first—this subject was hard—and then he moved on to the illustrated histories for young adults which told him all about the boy genius Mozart, and poor deaf Beethoven, and crazy Paganini who had supposedly sold his soul to the devil. He learned the definitions of symphony and concerto and sonata. He learned about the musical staff, quarter notes, half notes, major and minor key. He learned the names of all the symphonic instruments.

Then Michael went on to houses. And in no time, he came to understand the Greek Revival style and the Italianate style and the late Victorian style, and what distinguished these various types of buildings. He learned to identify Corinthian columns and Doric columns, to pick out side hall houses and raised cottages. With his new knowledge, he roamed the Garden District, his love for the things he saw deeply and quietly intensified.

Ah, he had hit the jackpot with all this. There was no reason to live in confusion anymore. He could “read up” on anything. On Saturday afternoons, he went through dozens of books on art, architecture, Greek mythology, science. He even read books on modern painting, and opera and ballet, which made him ashamed and afraid that his father might sneak up behind him and make fun of him.

The third thing that happened that year was a concert at the Municipal Auditorium. Michael’s father, like many firemen, took extra jobs in his time off; and that year he was working the concession stand at the auditorium, selling bottled soda, and Michael went with him one night to help out. It was a school night and he shouldn’t have gone at all, but he wanted to go. He wanted to see the Municipal Auditorium and what went on there, so his mother said OK.

During the first half of the program, before the intermission during which Michael would have to help his father, and after which they would pack up and go home, Michael went inside and up to the very top of the auditorium where the seats were empty, and he sat there waiting to see what the concert would be like. It reminded him of the students in The Red Shoes, actually, the students in the balcony, waiting up there with such expectation. And sure enough the place began to fill with beautifully dressed people—the uptowners of New Orleans—and the orchestra gathered to tune up in the pit. Even the strange thin man from First Street was there. Michael caught a glimpse of him far below, his face turned upward, as though he could actually see Michael all the way in the top row.

What followed swept Michael away. Isaac Stern, the great violinist, played that night, and it was the Beethoven Concerto for Violin and Orchestra, one of the most violently beautiful and simply eloquent pieces of music Michael had ever heard. Never once did it leave him in confusion. Never once did it leave him out.

Long after the concert was over, he was able to whistle the principal melody, and to remember as he did so the great sweet sensuous sound of the full orchestra and the thin heartbreaking notes that came from Isaac Stern’s violin.

But Michael’s life was poisoned by the longing created in him by this experience. In fact, he suffered, in the days that followed, possibly the worst dissatisfaction with his world that he had ever experienced. But he did not let anyone know this. He kept it sealed inside of him, just as he kept secret his knowledge of the subjects he studied at the library. He feared the snobbishness growing in himself, the loathing he knew that he could feel for those he loved if he let such a feeling have life.

And Michael couldn’t bear not to love his family. He couldn’t bear to be ashamed of them. He couldn’t bear the pettiness and the ingratitude of such a thing.

He could hate the people down the block. That was fine. But he had to love, and be loyal to, and be in harmony with, those under his own roof.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 605