THE MAYFAIR WITCHES 6 page

He never entirely erased his harsh accent, and sometimes when he was dealing with workmen on the job, he would slip back into it entirely. He never lost some of his crude habits or ideas either, and he understood that about himself.

His way of dealing with all this was perfect for California. He simply let it show. After all, it was only part of him. He thought nothing of saying “Where’s the meat and potatoes?” when he walked into some fancy nouvelle cuisine restaurant (he did actually like meat and potatoes a lot and ate them whenever it was possible, to the exclusion of other things), or of letting his Camel cigarette hang on his lip when he talked, just the way his father had always done.

And he got along with his liberal friends principally because he did not bother to argue with them, and while they were shouting at each other over pitchers of beer about foreign countries where they had never been and would never go, he was drawing pictures of houses on napkins.

When he did share his ideas, it was in a highly abstract way, from a remove, for he felt like an outsider in California really, an outsider in the American twentieth century. And he wasn’t the least bit surprised that nobody paid much attention to him.

But whatever the politics involved, he always connected most truly with those who were passionate as he was—craftsmen, artists, musicians, people who went about in the grip of obsession. And an amazing number of his friends and lovers were Russian-American Jews. They really seemed to understand his overall desire to live a meaningful life, to intervene in the world—even if in a very small way—with his visions. He had dreams of building his own great houses; of transforming whole city blocks, of developing whole enclaves of cafés, bookstores, bed-and-breakfast inns within old San Francisco neighborhoods.

Now and then, especially after his mother died, he’d think about the past in New Orleans, which seemed ever more otherworldly and fantastical. People in California thought they were free, but how conformist they were, he reasoned. Why, everybody coming from Kansas and Detroit and New York just reached for the same liberal ideas, the same styles of thinking, dressing, feeling. In fact, sometimes the conformity was downright laughable. Friends really said things like “Isn’t that the one we’re boycotting this week?” and “Aren’t we supposed to be against that?”

Back home, he had left a city of bigots perhaps, but it was also a city of characters. He could hear the old Irish Channel storytellers in his head, his grandfather telling about how he’d snuck into the Germans’ church once when he was a boy just to hear what German Latin sounded like. And how in the days of Grandma Gelfand Curry—the one German ancestor in the entire tribe—they’d baptized the babies in St. Mary’s to make her happy and then snuck them over to St. Alphonsus to be baptized again and right and proper in the Irish church, the same priest presiding patiently at both ceremonies.

What characters his uncles had been, those old men who died one by one as he was growing up. He could still hear them talking about swimming the Mississippi back and forth (which nobody did in Michael’s day) and diving off the warehouses when they were drunk, of tying big paddles to the pedals of their bikes to try to make them work in the water.

Everything had been a tale, it seemed. Talk could fill the summer night of Cousin Jamie Joe Curry in Algiers who became such a religious fanatic they had to chain him to a post all day long, and of Uncle Timothy who went nuts from the Linotype ink so that he stuffed all the cracks around the doors and windows with newspapers and spent his time cutting out thousands and thousands of paper dolls.

And what about beautiful Aunt Lelia, who had loved the Italian boy when she was young and never knew till she was old and dried up that her brothers had beaten him up one night and driven him out of the Irish Channel. No dagos for them. All her long life mourning for that boy. She had turned the supper table over in a rage when they told her.

Even some of the nuns had had fabulous stories to tell—old ones like Sister Bridget Marie who had substituted for two weeks when Michael was in the eighth grade, a really sweet little sister who still had an Irish brogue. She didn’t teach them a thing. She just told them tales about the Irish Ghost of Petticoat Loose, and witches—witches, can you believe it!—in the Garden District.

And some of the best talk in those times had been merely talk of life itself—of how it was to bottle your own beer, to live with only two oil lamps in a house, and how they’d had to fill the portable bathtub on Friday night so everybody could take a bath before the living room fireplace. Just life. Laundry boiling over a wood fire in the backyard, water from cisterns covered with green moss. Mosquito netting tucked in tight before you went to sleep. Things now probably utterly forgotten.

It would come back to him in the oddest flashes. He’d remember the smell of the linen napkins when his grandmother ironed them before putting them in the deep drawers of the walnut sideboard. He’d remember the taste of crab gumbo with crackers and beer; the scary sound of the drums at the Mardi Gras parades. He’d see the ice man rushing up the back steps, the giant block of ice on his padded shoulder. And over and over those marvelous voices, which had seemed so coarse then, but seemed now to be possessed of a rich vocabulary, a flare for the dramatic phrase, a sheer love of language.

Tales of great fires, and the famous streetcar labor riots, and the cotton loaders who had screwed the bales into the holds of the ships with giant iron screws, singing as they worked, in the days before the cotton compressors.

It seemed a great world in retrospect. Everything was so antiseptic in California sometimes. Same clothes, same cars, same causes. Maybe Michael didn’t really belong here. Maybe he never would. Yet surely he didn’t belong back there. Why, he hadn’t seen the place in all these years …

He wished he’d paid more attention to those guys in those days. He’d been too afraid. He wished he could talk to his dad now, sit with him and all those other crazy firemen outside the firehouse on Washington Avenue.

Had the oak trees really been that big? Had they really arched completely over the street so that you gazed down a tunnel of green all the way to the river?

He’d remember the color of twilight as he walked home late after football practice, along Annunciation Street. How beautiful the orange and pink lantana pushing through the little iron fences. Ah, was there a sky so purely incandescent as that sky, changing from pink to violet and then finally to gold over the tops of the shotgun cottages. There could not have been such an unearthly place.

And the Garden District, ah, the Garden District. His memories of it were so ethereal as to be suspect.

Sometimes he dreamed of it—a warm glowing paradise where he found himself walking among splendid palaces, surrounded by ever-blooming flowers, and shimmering green leaves. Then he’d wake and think, Yes, I was back there, walking down First Street. I was home. But it couldn’t really be like that, not really, and he’d want to see it all again.

Particular houses would come back to him—the great rambling house on Coliseum and Third, painted pure white even to its cast-iron railings. And the double-galleried side hall houses he had always loved the most, with their four front columns up and down, their long flanks, and high twin chimneys.

He’d remember even people whom he had often glimpsed on his regular walks, old men in seersucker suits and straw hats, ladies with canes, black nurses in crisp blue cotton uniforms pushing white babies in carriages. And that man, that strange, immaculately dressed man whom he so often saw on First Street in that deep overgrown garden.

He wanted to go back to check memory against reality. He wanted to see the little house on Annunciation Street where he had grown up. He wanted to see St. Alphonsus where he’d been an altar boy when he was ten. And St. Mary’s across the street with its Gothic arches and wooden saints, where he had also served Mass. Were the murals on the ceiling of St. Alphonsus really so lovely?

Sometimes as he drifted off to sleep, he would imagine himself in that church again on Christmas Eve when it had been packed for Midnight Mass. Candles blazed on the altars. He would hear the euphoric hymn “Adeste Fideles.” Christmas Eve, with the rain gusting in the doors, and at home after, the little tree glowing in the corner and the gas heater blazing on the grate. How beautiful those tiny blue flames had been. How beautiful that little tree, with its lights which meant the Light of the World, and its ornaments which meant the gifts of the Wise Men, and its green-smelling branches which meant the promise of the summer to come even in the depth of the winter’s cold.

There came to him a memory of a Midnight Mass procession in which the little girls of the first grade had been dressed as angels as they came through the sanctuary and down the main aisle of the church. He could smell the Christmas greens, mingling with the sweetness of the flowers and the burning wax. The little girls had been singing of the Christ Child. He had seen Rita Mae Dwyer and Marie Louise Guidry and his cousin, Patricia Anne Becker, and all the other pesty little girls he knew, but how beautiful they had looked in their little white gowns with stiff cloth wings. Not just little monsters anymore but real angels. That was the magic of Christmas. And when he got home after, all his presents were under the lighted tree.

Processions. There were so many. But the ones to the Virgin Mary he never really loved. She was too confused in his mind with the mean nuns who hurt the boys so much, and he could not feel a great devotion to her, which had saddened him until he was old enough not to care.

But Christmas he never forgot. It was the one remnant of his religion which never left him, for he sensed behind it a great, shimmering history that went back and back through the millennia to dark forests where fires blazed and pagans danced. He loved to remember the crib with the smiling infant, and the solemn moment at midnight when Christ was born into the world again.

In fact, ever after in California, Christmas Eve was the one day Michael held sacred. He always celebrated it as others celebrated New Year’s—for it was for him the symbol of a new beginning: of time redeeming you and all your failings so that you might start again. Even when he was alone he sat up with his glass of wine until midnight, the light of the little tree the only illumination in his room. And that last Christmas, there had been snow—of all things, snow—snow falling softly and soundlessly in the wind at the very moment perhaps when his father had gone through the burning warehouse roof on Tchoupitoulas Street.

Somehow or other, Michael never did go home.

He just never got around to it. He was always struggling to complete a job already over deadline. And what little vacation time he had he spent in Europe, or in New York roaming the great monuments and museums. His various lovers wanted it that way over the years. Who wanted to see Mardi Gras in New Orleans when they could go to Rio? Why go to the South of the United States when they could go to the South of France?

But often Michael reflected that he had acquired everything he had ever longed for on those old Garden District walks, and he ought to go back there to take stock, to see whether or not he was deceiving himself. Were there not moments when he felt empty? When he felt as if he were waiting for something, something of extreme importance, and he did not know what that was?

The one thing he had not found was a great and enduring love, but he knew this would come in time, and maybe then he would take his bride with him to visit his home, and he wouldn’t be alone as he walked the cemetery paths or the old sidewalks. Who knows? Maybe he could even stay for a while, wandering the old streets.

Michael did have several affairs over the years, and at least two of these were like marriages. Both women were Jewish, of Russian descent, passionate, spiritual, brilliant and independent. And Michael was always painfully proud of these polished and clever ladies. These affairs were born in talk as much as in sensuality. Talk the night long after making love, talk over pizza and beer, talk as the sun came up, that’s what Michael had always done with his lovers.

He learned much from these relationships. His egoless openness was highly seductive to these women, and he soaked up whatever they had to teach, rather effortlessly. They loved traveling with him to New York or the Riviera or Greece and seeing his charming enthusiasm and deep feeling for what he beheld. They shared their favorite music with him, their favorite painters, their favorite foods, their ideas about furniture, clothes. Elizabeth instructed him in how to buy a proper Brooks Brothers suit and Paul Stewart shirts. Judith took him to Bullock and Jones for his first Burberry and to fancy salons for proper haircuts, and taught him how to order European wines and how to cook pasta and why baroque music was just as good as the classical music he loved.

He laughed at all this, but he learned it. Both women teased him about his freckles and his heavyweight build, and the way his hair hung in his big blue eyes, and how visiting parents loved him, and about his bad little boy charm, and how splendid he looked in black tie. Elizabeth called him her “tough guy with the heart of gold,” and Judith nicknamed him Sluggo. He took them to Golden Glove boxing matches and basketball games and to good bars for drinking beer, and taught them how to appreciate soccer and rugby games in Golden Gate Park on Sundays if they didn’t already know it, and even how to street-fight if they wanted to learn. But that was more of a joke than anything serious. He also took them to the opera and to the symphony, which he attended with religious fervor. And they introduced him to Dave Brubeck, Miles Davis, Bill Evans, and the Kronos Quartet.

Michael’s receptiveness, and his passion, tended to seduce everybody.

But his meanness charmed his girlfriends too, almost always. He could, when angry, or even slightly threatened, revert to the grim-faced Irish Channel kid in a moment, and when he did this, he did it with great conviction and confidence and a certain unconscious sexuality. Women were impressed by his mechanical skills as well, his talent with the hammer and nails, and by his fearlessness.

Fear of humiliation, yes, that he secretly understood, and there were a few irrational childhood fears which still haunted him. But fear of anything real? As an adult, he did not know the meaning of it. When there was a cry in the night, Michael was the first one down the steps to investigate.

This was not so common among highly educated men. Neither was Michael’s characteristically direct and lusting and enthusiastic approach to physical sex. He liked it plain and simple, or fancier if that’s what they wanted; and he liked it in the morning when he first woke up as well as at night. This stole hearts for him.

The first breakup—with Elizabeth—was Michael’s fault, he felt, because he was just too young and had not remained faithful. Elizabeth got fed up with his other “adventures,” though he swore they “didn’t mean a thing,” and finally packed her bags and left him. He was heartbroken and contrite. He followed her to New York, but it was no good. He came back home to his empty flat and got drunk off and on for six months of mourning. He could not believe it when Elizabeth married a professor at Harvard, and he was jubilant when a year later she got divorced.

He flew to New York to console her, they had a fight in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and he cried for hours on the flight back. In fact, he looked so sad that the stewardess took him home with her when they landed and took care of him for three whole days.

By the time Elizabeth came the next summer, Judith had already come into Michael’s life.

Judith and Michael lived together for almost seven years and no one ever thought they would break up. Then Judith accidentally conceived a child by Michael and, against his wishes, decided not to give birth to it.

It was the worst disappointment Michael had ever experienced, and it destroyed all love between the couple.

Michael didn’t contest Judith’s right to abort the child. He could not imagine a world in which women did not have such a right. And the historian in him knew that laws against abortion had never been enforceable, because no relationship existed quite like the relationship between a mother and her unborn child.

No, he never quarreled with her right, and would in fact have defended it. But he had never foreseen that a woman living with him in luxury and security, a woman whom he would marry in an instant if she permitted it, would want to abort their child.

Michael begged her not to do it. It was theirs, was it not, and its father wanted it desperately and could not bear the thought that it would miss its chance at life. It didn’t have to grow up with them if Judith didn’t want it. Michael would arrange everything for its care elsewhere. He had plenty of money. He would visit the child on his own so that Judith never had to know. He had visions of governesses, fine schools, all the things he’d never had. But more significant, it was a living thing, this unborn baby, and it had his blood in its little veins and he couldn’t see any good reason for it to die.

These remarks were horrifying to Judith. They cut her to the quick. She did not want to be a mother at this time; she didn’t feel that she could do it. She was almost finished with her Ph.D. at U.C. Berkeley, but she had her dissertation still to write. And her body was not something to be used merely to deliver a child to another person. The great shock of giving birth to that child, of giving it up, was more than she could possibly bear. She would live with that guilt forever. That Michael did not understand her point of view was exquisitely painful to her. She had always counted upon her right to abort an unwanted child. It was her safety net, so to speak. Now her freedom, her dignity, and her sanity were threatened.

Some day they would have a child, she said, when the time was right for both of them, for parenthood was a matter of choice, and no child should be brought into the world who was not loved and wanted by both parents.

None of this made sense to Michael. Death was better than abandonment? How could Judith feel guilt for giving it away, and no guilt at all for merely destroying it? Yes, both parents should want a child. But why should one parent have the right to say that it couldn’t come into the world? They weren’t poor, they weren’t diseased; this wasn’t a child of rape. Why, they were practically married and could certainly get married if Judith wanted! They had so much to give this baby. Even if it lived with others, think what they could do for it. Why the hell did the little thing have to perish, and stop saying it wasn’t a person, it was on track to be a person, or Judith wouldn’t want to be killing it. Was a newborn baby any more a person, for the love of God?

And so they went back and forth, their arguments sharpening, becoming ever more complex, vacillating between the personal and the philosophical with no hope of resolution.

Finally Michael made his last ditch stand. If Judith would only give birth to the child, he would take it away with him. Judith would never see either of them again. And he would do whatever Judith wanted in return. He would give her whatever he had that she might value. He cried as he pleaded with her.

Judith was crushed. Michael had chosen this child over her. He was trying to buy her body, her suffering, the thing growing inside her. She couldn’t bear to be in the same house with him. She cursed him for the things he’d said. She cursed his background, his ignorance, and above all his stunning unkindness to her. Did he think it was easy what she meant to do? But every instinct in her told her she must terminate this brutal physical process, she must extinguish this bit of life which was never meant, and which clung to her now, growing against her will, destroying Michael’s love for her and their life together.

Michael couldn’t look at her. If she wanted to go, she should go. He wanted her to go. He didn’t want to know the exact day or hour that their child would be destroyed.

A dread came over him. Everything around him was gray. Nothing tasted good or looked good. It was as if a metallic gloom had gripped his world, and all colors and sensations had paled in it. He knew Judith was in pain, but he couldn’t help her. In fact, he couldn’t stop himself from hating her.

He thought about those nuns at school, smacking the boys with the flat of their hands; he remembered the grip of a nun’s fingers on his arm as she shoved him into the ranks; he remembered thoughtless power, petty brutality. Of course that had nothing to do with this, he told himself. Judith cared; Judith was a good person. She was doing what she thought she had to do. But Michael felt as helpless now as he’d felt back then, when the nuns patrolled the halls, monsters in their black veils, their mannish shoes thudding on the polished wood.

Judith moved out while Michael was at work. The bill for the abortion—Boston hospital and doctor—came a week later. Michael sent his check to the appropriate address. He never saw Judith again.

And after that, for a long time Michael was a loner. Erotic contact had never been something he enjoyed with strangers. But now he had a fear of it, and chose his partners only very occasionally and with great discretion. He was careful to an extreme degree. He wanted no other lost children.

Also, he found himself unable to forget the dead baby, or the dead fetus more properly speaking. It wasn’t that he meant to brood on the child—he had nicknamed it Little Chris, but nobody needed to know this—it was that he began to see images of fetuses in the movies he went to see, in the ads for movies which he saw in the papers.

As always movies loomed large in Michael’s life. As always they were a major, ongoing part of his education. He fell into a trance in a darkened theater. He felt some visceral connection between what was happening on the screen and his own dreams and subconscious, and with his ongoing efforts to figure out the world in which he lived.

And now he saw this curious thing which no one else around him mentioned: did not the cinematic monsters of this time bear a remarkable resemblance to the children being aborted every day in the nation’s clinics?

Take Ridley Scott’s Alien for instance, where the little monster is born right out of the chest of a man, a squealing fetus who then retains its curious shape, even as it grows large, gorging itself upon human victims.

And what about Eraserhead, where the ghastly fetal offspring born to the doomed couple cries continuously.

Why, at one point it seemed to him there were too many horror films with fetuses in them to make a count. There was The Kindred and Ghoulies and Leviathan and those writhing clones being born like fetuses out of the pods in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. He could hardly bear to watch that scene when he saw it again at the Castro. He got up and walked out of the theater.

God only knew how many more fetus horror movies there were. Take the remake of The Fly. Didn’t the hero wind up looking like a fetus? And what about Fly II, with its images of birth and rebirth? The never-ending theme, he figured. And then came Pumpkinhead, where the great vengeful Appalachian demon grows out of a fetal corpse right before your eyes, and keeps its overblown fetal head throughout its hideous rampages.

What must this mean, Michael tried to figure out. Not that we suffer guilt for what we do, for we believe it is morally right to control the birth of our young, but that we have uneasy dreams of all those little beings washed, unborn, into eternity? Or was it mere fear of the beings themselves who want to claim us—eternally free adolescents—and make us parents. Fetuses from hell! He laughed bitterly at the whole idea in spite of himself.

Look at John Carpenter’s The Thing, with its screaming fetal heads! And what about the old classic Rosemary’s Baby, for God’s sake, and that silly movie It’s Alive, about the monster baby who murdered the milk man when it got hungry. The image was inescapable. Babies—fetuses. He saw it everywhere he turned.

He pondered it just as he used to ponder the magnificent houses and elegant persons in old black-and-white horror films of his youth.

No use trying to talk about all this with his friends. They had believed Judith was in the right; and they would never understand the distinctions he was trying to make. Horror movies are our troubled dreams, he thought. And we are obsessed now with birth, and birth gone wrong, and birth turned against us. And back to the Happy Hour Theater he went in his memory. He was watching The Bride of Frankenstein again. So science had scared them back then, and even further back when Mary Shelley had written down her inspiring visions.

Oh, well, he couldn’t figure out these things. He wasn’t really a historian or social scientist. Maybe he wasn’t clever enough. He was a contractor by trade. Best to stick to refinishing oak floors and stripping brass faucets.

And besides, he didn’t hate women. He didn’t. He didn’t fear them either. Women were just people, and sometimes they were better people than men, gentler, kinder. He liked their company better than the company of men most of the time. And it had never surprised him that, except for this one issue, they usually understood what he had to say more sympathetically than men did.

When Elizabeth called, eager to kindle the old flame, he was happy, very happy, to get on a plane for New York. Their weekend was bliss together, except for his elaborate precautions against conception, a matter which had now become an obsession. They would make it work again, they both knew it. They were one step from a rare moment of fine excitement. But Elizabeth didn’t want to leave the East Coast, and Michael could not imagine Great Expectations in Manhattan. They would write to each other, they would think about it; they would talk long distance. They would wait and see.

As time passed, Michael lost a little faith that he would ever have the love he wanted.

But his was a world in which many adults did not have that love. They had friends, freedom, style, riches, career, but not that love, and this was the condition of modern life and so it was for him, too. And he grew to take this for granted.

He had plenty of comrades on the job, old college buddies, no shortage of female companionship when he wanted it. And as he reached his forty-eighth birthday, he figured there was still time for everything. He felt and looked young, as did the other people his age around him. Why, he still had those damned freckles. And women still gave him the eye, that was certain. In fact, he found it easier to attract them now than when he had been an overeager young man.

Who could say? Maybe his little casual affair with Therese, the young woman he’d recently met at the Symphony, would start to mean something. She was too young, he knew that, he was angry with himself on that score, but then she would call and say: “Michael, I expected to hear from you by this time! You’re really manipulating me!” Whatever that meant. And off they would go to supper and her place after that.

But was it only a deep love that he missed? Was there something else? One morning, he woke up and realized in a flash that the summer he had been waiting for all these years was never going to come. And the miserable damp of the place had worked itself into the marrow of his bones. There would never be warm nights full of the smell of jasmine. There would never be warm breezes from the river or the Gulf. But this he had to accept, he told himself. After all this was his city now. How could he ever go home?

Yet at times it seemed to him that San Francisco was no longer painted in rich colors of ocher and Roman red; that it had become a drab sepia, and that the dull glare of the perpetually gray sky had permanently blunted his spirits.

Even the beautiful houses he restored seemed sometimes no more than stage sets, devoid of real tradition, fancy traps to capture a past that had never existed, to create a feeling of solidity for people who lived moment to moment in a fear of death bordering on hysteria.

Oh, but he was a lucky man, and he knew it. And surely there were good times and good things to come.

So that was Michael’s life, a life that for all practical purposes was now over, because he had drowned on May 1 and come back, haunted, obsessed, rambling on and on about the living and the dead, unable to remove the black gloves from his hands, fearful of what he might see—the great inundations of meaningless images—and picking up strong emotional impressions even from those whom he did not touch.

Date: 2015-12-18; view: 554