Visions of Gerard Read online

  All the desperate praying in the stuffy parlor is scaring the kids half to death, they think “It’ll happen to me too but look how they’re all afraid of it?”

  Clasped in Gerard’s kindly fingers is a beautiful solid silver crucifix—There are flowers from relatives in Maine who couldnt come, from friends—All the people in the world who wear their daily face come passing with their final face, as, for instance, Manuel, sober, dark-attired, unaccostably silent, he wont even speak to the priest, to Emil he makes one regretful nod—He’ll be one of the pallbearers.

  Old Bull Baloon is gone west, wont be at the funeral.

  The women, the aunts, stand at the back and are never weary of shaking their heads from side to side, and lamenting the loss, and talking about it—

  Young priests make polite calls and add their powerful prayers and depart swiftly to duties in the gloom—One of them has such a handsome sad face, it’s a shame he never married and presented it to some respectful wench—

  “The young Lafontaine!”

  “Aw oui—he comes from Montreal—I didnt know he was so short.”

  “Yes but he’s so pretty.”

  “Pretty? Handsome as a heart—It’s too bad—All the good men are bought up or else won.”

  “One or the other.”

  “Look here comes old lady Picard—she never misses one—”

  “No—Oh well, the old lady, we’ll accept her prayers.”

  “Her prayers are not to be thrown away.”

  “There—the little angels—another line—This one, they tell me it was Gerard’s class—yes—the nuns are puttin em in front—there. The little angels. They’re afraid.”

  “Ah”—sigh—“they’ll have to know some day, it happens to all of us.”

  “Ah, but he was so young.”

  “Look at that old bat across the street, she’s burning her garbage and all the smoke blowin on the house of the dead with the wind.”

  The house of the dead indeed, it was hardly my house—I’d lost Gerard in the shuffle.

  High above, in the stormy sky, a bird with little buffeted birdy bones bats ahead, beak to the nose of the wind—Shrouds of gray rain fall Aweing and slanting to our crystal—It is the sky, the void, that no fist could form in and hold any part of it—Below, on the stain of earth, where we all, human brothers and sisters, pop like flower after flower from the fecund same joke of unstymied pregnant earth and raise standardbearers of fertility and ego-personality, life, below the blown shrodes and woe-bo blackclouds June is handing down from some whoreson unseasonal storm, patches of brown and yellow and black show where we live, chimneys are pouring black smoke—“The Chimbleys of the World!”—And we are angels revisiting it—Coming down, far, sad, wide, the world, the earth, this pot, this place, this parturience-organizer—There are the chimney smokes fuming up and pouring and defiling open space, and there the tracks, cracks, cities, dead cats floating in rivers, calendars on the wall indicating June 1926—License plates on old cars sayin Massachusetts, the helm and Chineemark of it—The name of a store, in gold leaf letters embossed and chipping already, “Lowell Provision Company,” a self-believing butcher with a handlebar mustache standing in the door, full of human hope and realistic sentimentality among the charnels and hacked thighs of his own making, bleedied in his blocks, his hands raw from blood-juice, red in fact—Shakespeare, Throwspeare, Disappear Spear, and where is the Provision made for a “cessation and a truce” to all this sprouting of being just so it can wilt and be sacked, canned—We the angel spirits, descend to this earth, earth indeed, we are awed to see living beings, living beings indeed, we see man there ghostly crystal apparition juggling as he goes in selfmade streets inside Mind a liquid phantom glur-ing on the brain ectoplasm—A vision in water—

  Papier-mâché canals flow in downtown Lowell, men smoking cigars stand by the rail spitting in the waters that reflect drizzle hopelessness of 1926—And to their way of thinking, ahem, the money in their pocket is real and the pride in their heads as real as sin and as solid as Hell—And the money that is real and the pride that is solid is about to buy an actual porkchop which tho it has since appeared (it is now 1956, Jan. 16, Midnight), the hunger with it, and the hungerer to boot, can still be called real, tho it neither is not, nor is, but beyond such considerations anyway, like a reflection of a porkchop on water—Facts well known by fat Mr. Groscorp who now, in his apartment across the street from the St. Louis Presbytère, on West Sixth Street, is about to partake of his noonday meal at the kitchen table by the rain drizzled window that looks down on the street where suddenly a slow caravanseri of limousines and flower-roadsters has rounded the corner from Beaulieu Street, and headed up to the church front, where official waiters minister with the proper silver special knobs—His face is huge, muckchop rich as kincobs, sleek as surah, gray pale and fetid to-make-you-sick, a great beast, with small mouth makes an oo of simpery delight, and great hanging jowls—A bathrobe, slippers, a fat cat—Winebottle and chops laid out—His huge paunch keeps him well away from his fork, and makes it necessary for the eating-chair to be scraped a good deal of the way back, so that he stoops, or rather hunches forward with huge mountainous determination, like a tunnel, to his about-to-be-eaten lunch—“Ah,” he interrupted, “another corpse!”—And he raises napkin to lips, and watches leaning up to see below closer—“In all this rain, they’re gonna bury another one,—aw dammit, it’s a pity, it spoils all my meal—It all goes down the same hole, why make such a great ceremonial fuss?—The solemnity, the gloves—the special gloves and the stiff legs—the little mousey smile—the little mustache—the big hunger for nothing to eat, or else the great famine in the richness of the season—One or t’other, it’s all the same, because,” raising his eyes to the upper part of the window and examining the blown gust clouds, “you might say”—he burps delicately, lowering the shade—“That, there’s plenty more where it came from, the comin and the goin—Outa my way, I’m eating—We’ll think about it later—”

  The funeral directors with their cars had assembled at our door on Beaulieu and carefully, from our great drear house built on an old cemetery in which were more dead soul dusts than in all the words of this book, its sorrow was removed from its nest—Sleek like a snake the coffin was slid out and in the hearse, bang.

  And around the corner.

  The children and some onlookers follow on the sidewalk, the church is only a block and a half away.

  Right by the building where huge Mr. Groscorp’s eating his necessitous Samsara dinner, is a gang of painters and plasterers and tile layers working on a new house—They’ve just had their last lunch slug of coffee and feel good and make cracks.

  “Ah, another one for the cemetery?”

  “Why dont they hurry up, damn them, it’s not so much fun playin with the dead in the rain!”

  “An old bastard who fell face first dead in his soup, I bet.”

  “Or else some old bitch spent all her life yellin at her husband and her brother, now they wont hear her no more—Do you believe those hypocrite faces you see?”

  “Or else an old priest, dead in his bed.”

  “Or else an old housepainter, he fell off the ladder and spent six months in the hospital yelling ‘A dammit it hurts!’ and after that they carried him out.”

  “No—too gay—a whore, from Boston, returned home, she spent sixteen years in the whorehouse swingin her ass for a buck and now the funeral director with the little ass’s got half, and—”

  “And the rest lost in the bank a the dead.”

  “Throw em some rice, we’ll marry em!”

  “Look, they stopped to take out the coffin.”

  “Coffin for the so-pretty” (Tombeau pour les si beaux).

  “It’s not a long one—”

  “It’s not a long one?—dammit, it’s a child’s coffin.”

/>   They all get quiet.

  “Ah, well that’s a story we forgot.”

  “We’re not good enough storytellers.”

  “Well me I’m paintin.”

  “Paint, dog, till your hand close your buttons.”

  “Till they put a brush in your mug, my fine Piroux, and after that we’ll sing dirty songs for ya.”

  “Suits me.”

  “Look—that little coffin, the kid wasnt ten.”

  “All the better for him.”

  “And why?”

  “And why he asks me with his ignorant face?”

  “It’s raining on your head, come on in here.”

  “There’ll be plenty of rainin on the head today.”

  And inside the church now as the procession comes in, the pallbearers carrying the little coffin, followed by Ma and Pa and me and Nin and relatives, across the gritty sidewalk, great comes the opening peals of the organ sounding the beginning of the mass.

  “Suscipe, sancte Pater, omnipotens aeterne Deus, hanc immaculatam hostiam, quam ego indignus famulus tuus offero tibi, Deo meo vivo et vero, pro innumerabilibus peccatis, et offensionibus, et negligentiis meis, et pro omnibus cricumstantibus, sed et pro omnibus fidelibus christianis vivis atque defunctis: ut mihi et illis proficiat ad salutem in vitam aeternam. Amen.”

  An eternal salute . . .

  One of the first if not the very first, memories of my life, I’m in a shoe repair store and there are shelves cluttered with dark shoes, innumerable battered shoes, and it’s a gray rainy day (like the day of the funeral, or rather, foggy-misty with occasional drizzle)—I’m presumably with Ma and probably one year old in my baby carriage (if it happened at all) and the Vision is of the great Gloom of the earth and the great Clutter of human life and the great Drizzly Dream of the dreary eternities, and as we leave the shop, or, as is left the shop, by self or phantom, suddenly is seen a little old man, or ordinary man, in a strangely slanted gray hat, in coat, presumably, walking off up the dreary and endless boulevard of the drizzle dump, the tearful beatness of the scene and weird as if maybe this is just a memory of mine from some previous incarnation in St. Petersburg Russia or maybe the gluey ghees of dark fitful kitchens in Thibet ancient and long ago, tho not with that hat—That hat, with its strange Dostoevskyan slant, belongs to the West, this side of this hairball, earth—And it seems to me that the little man is going towards some inexpressibly beautiful opening in the rain where it will be all open-sky and radiant, but I will never go there, as I’m being wheeled another way in my present vehicle—He, on foot, heads for the pure land—So that it seemed to me as the organ music played and the priest intoned in Latin at the altar far up the pews in the end of time, that Gerard, now motionless in the central presented bier at the foot of the main aisle and by the altar rail, with his long face composed, honorably mounted and all beflowered and anointed, was delivered to that Pure Land where I could never go or at least not for a long time—Dread drizzle mer, dread drizzle mer!

  “Et pro omnibus” sings the priest in rising and falling Latin, incense everywhere, and turns with that untouchable delicacy of lace over holy black, with all his paraphernalias, and it seems in my 3-year’d brain “et pro om-ni-boos” is the description of that land and that attainment, the glory of Gerard—(that was prophesied)—“aeternam,” the gloomy fall of the song voice, “eternity,” I can almost guess and smell the location and no way in my wild mind to muddle my way and shake off—And I’m so little and so far back, and in my reveries and dreams later on it seems the funeral took place across the street from our house in a strange other church permeating everywhere—Just as the simplest thing in the world, when properly looked at, is the original riddle.

  —Way at the back of the church are blankfaced standers, it’s like Good Friday when the church is crowded and it’s usually raining (and according to superstition) and there are standers at the back in overshoes or rubbers or with umbrellas who want to quit swiftly the snowy grace and get back to the poolhall—I dont understand anything of the funeral service, its solemnity escapes my high head as I look around and mull over faces of people and those tragic overshoes and wet splashes of almost puddles at the back of the church and the hopeless dampness as tho it was all taking place underneath some stone steps and there are the drear shadows making the yellowy marble so faint, so sad—The daubing at eyes by aunts and mothers, their faces squeezing into sections wishing he hadnt died, ah, seems to me fitting and proper, it’s all part of the show—It’s a vast ethereal movie, I’m an extra and Gerard is the hero and God is directing it from Heaven—

  I see bleak wooden fences in the rain and the little man with the mysterious hat and then my mind swirls and I see nothing but the swarm of angels in the church in the form of sudden myriad illuminated snowflakes of ecstasy—I scoff to think that anybody should cry—I let go a little yell, my mother grabs my face and taps me gently, “Non non non”—People gloomy at the funeral have heard the little child’s voice, they think: “He doesnt understand.”—

  I want to express somehow, “Here and Now I see the ecstasy,” the divine and perfect ecstasy, reward without end, it has come, has been always with us, the formalities of the tomb are ignorant irrelevencies most befittingly gravely conducted by proper qualified doers and actors and Latin-singers—Of a rouse, the boys’ choir takes up in the back and my mother’s eyes burst with tears, she never could stand boys singing anyway.

  “Some of them knew Gerard!” she announces proudly to near-at-hand solemn Emil and thru him at Marie—“The little angels!” (“Sing, sing,” she thinks, “sing with all your hearts my angels for my friend Gerard who is dead, my little man, my little sad son—It’s for yourselves you sing, angels!!”)

  I myself hear the boys singing and turn around to see them in the choir loft with their little oo-voices uplifted and rosy to the black arms of a hypnotist, a hypnotist of feeling—By the way the boys are singing and by significant rustles you can tell the service (and increasing coughs) is almost over—Easy enough to cough cough cough and go back home, off other people’s funerals!

  And Oh the coffin at the forefront, and the priest flicking the ciborium incense pot and at each flick, in three directions, by some magic bell rope signal, the outside roofbell flicks like smoke itself and kicks off a soft “ker plang” for the edification of the people of Centreville, Gerard has died—Drizzly news—From the incense pot, ‘ker-tling,’ so gentle and quiet, to the sound of the connecting signal rope, ‘kak,’ and ‘ker plang,’ such beautiful music and I see three fumes of music smoke float up and away—Let there be rejoicing.

  We all get in cars and they slowly weave the parade and out we go on a long slow drive along the Merrimac River, by sodden trees in all their foliage looking sad, to the bridge at Tyngsboro, and across that, to Nashua, entering that little city (my parents’ come-from town) in bleak array, to the cemetery outside town, where I remember the long gray wall, and the glistening boulevard in the rain—And they haul the coffin gently down to graveropes that for all their gentle look have no gentle job to do, and lower away, easy does it, the little hunk of pain, into the mud—Roots and plopping pieces show in the dug sides—Men stand around, my father in the midst of them, bareheaded, with that gooply helplessness beneath immense and endless skies that say “Yah” down upon the entire scene—My father’s curly hair is moist, and uncombed, and his lids of eyes are down where they’ll always be—A cold place to kneel, this earth, and he’ll kneel again, it’s a cold place for knees–Ma and Ti Nin sitting with me in a black car burst out sobbing as the coffin downward disappears, I turn to them and say “Well why are you crying?”

  “Ti Jean you dont understand, you’re too young to understand!” they wail, seeing my rosy face, my questioning eyes.

  I look again, the men have stepped a pace aback, expectant, old gravedigger picks up his shovel and closes the book.

>   THE END

  Sometime in the same

  night that’s everywhere

  the same right now

  and forevermore amen