Visions of Gerard Page 9

  “Oui”—(tho I was too littly naive to know what it meant forgive, and hadnt really forgiven him, holding back that reserve of selfly splendor for future pomp)—As solid as anything, as solid as the rock of the mountain, the solid folly men and boys and women will have—“I hit you—but I didnt have to, now I know it, the junk is packed away, the thing I was building with my set” (he shrugs gallicly) “I dont remember it any more!”

  “The grignot!”

  “Dont remind me,” he smiles wanly.

  “Ti Jean, dont bother Gerard, he’s got to sleep this morning.”

  June, late June, with the trees having burdgeoned green and golden and the beeswax bugs are high chickadeeing the topmost trees embrowsying the drowsy air of reader’s noon, the backfences of Beaulieu street sleeping like lazy dogs, the flies rubbing their miser forelegs on screens, “The little flies too, you dont have to kill them—they rub their little legs, they dont know how to do anything else—”

  “Sleep Gerard, the doctor wants you to sleep—Go outside Ti Jean, you’ve talked enough this morning.”

  And I cry, to lose my buddy, whose pale door is closed on me, and there he is with his protected little kitty in the fold of his sheets and the birds are at the window waiting for more of those familiar crumbs from his sure hands—

  The doctor comes more often, leaves sooner.

  I wander up and down Beaulieu Street, lonely, little, a little Our Gang Rascal with no gang and no comedy and no ring-eyed dog or Pancakes to throw—All alone in mid afternoon I sit on the highwood backsteps of the St. Louis Bazaar hall and strive to imitate the sound it makes when Uncle Mike Duluoz and his wife and all the Duluozes drive over from Nashua to visit us and sit in the parlor and lament—“A BWA! A BWA!”—I’m especially imitating Uncle Mike, the hurt curl of his lips—His great rouge cry-face, poor Uncle Mike had he seen that, my little pantomime of him, he’d a wept cruds to the earth to add to the woe—

  “Cut out that noise, you little brat—we’ve been listening to that bwa-bwa all morning!” shouts a woman from the tenement washlines across the way—I cant go on with my A-BWA play, go back to the house, Gerard’s asleep, Ma’s doing the wash, I go in the cellar, it’s dark and damp and sad—My mother calls from the door above “Your little chum is back!” meaning some child from down the street I’d befriended a few weeks ago and now I dont remember him from beans—Hands aback clasped I go to Gerard’s bedroom door, he meditates gently in mid afternoon, the shades drawn—

  “Ti Jean,” he calls me, “take my pillow and raise it a little—there—thanks—I wanta see my birds outside—raise the shade—tick tzick tzick birdies!”—His breath smells like crushed flowers—I see and behold the sad sideways look for the last time, the long triste nun-like face, the blue eyes in their hollows.

  Soon he’s asleep on his sitting-up pillow.

  When the little kitty is given his milk, I imitate Gerard and get down on my stomach and watch him greedily licking up his milk with pink tongue and chup chup jowls—

  “You happy Ti Pou?—your nice lala”—

  They see me in the parlor imitating Gerard with imaginary talks back and forth concerning lambs, kitties, clouds.

  July comes, the pop firecrackers start coming on like a war in the neighborhood—Gerard’s room takes on the quality of a lily, white, wan, fragrant—My mother and father are shaking their heads—

  “What’s the mater with Gerard?”

  “He’s very sick, Ti Pousse.”

  Ti Nin and I wait on the porch wondering what’s wrong.

  I wanta go in and talk to him but I’m not allowed—The doctor turns up the sheets and looks at Gerard’s swollen legs and says “That must hurt—I’ve never seen a kid like this—keep giving him that prescription—How you feelin Gerard?”

  Gerard unaccustomed to being spoken to in English, answers, with girlish lips made so by sickness, or girlishshould-I-say-beautiful lips, “I’m aw-right, Doctor Simp-kins,” with the accent on “kins,” like my mother talks—

  The big doctor betakes his black suited bulk out of that house of sorrows and goes home, having given up hope a long time ago—

  Some time near the 4th of July he tells my mother to call the priest—“He cant have the strength to go any further” (“if he does,” adding to think, “it’ll be murder”)—

  My father, arms loaded with paper bags in which are firecrackers, with an expectant smile comes in that night, but he’s told the priest will be called—With that comes the nuns, there they come down Beaulieu Street, three of them, to sit at Gerard’s bedside praying—He’s awake.

  “How are you feeling, Gerard?”

  “Awright, my sister.”

  “Are you afraid, sweetheart?”

  “No my sister—The priest blessed me—”

  They ask him questions which he answers briefly and softly, my mother sees the nun taking it down on paper—She never saw the paper again—Some secret transmitted from mouth to heart, at the quiet hour, I have no idea where any such paper or record could have ended or could be found today, lest it’s written on the rock in the mountains of gold in the country I cant reach—Or some fleecy mystery imparted, concerning the kinds of fearlessness, or the proof of faith, or the ethereality of pain, or the unreality of death (and life too), or the calm hand of God everywhere slowly benedicting—Whatever, the solemn tearful nuns did take it down, his last words, at deathside bed, and betook themselves back to the nunnery with it, and crossed themselves, and you can be sure there were special prayers that night—Saint Teresa, who promised to come back and shower the earth with roses after her death, shower ye with roses the secret nun who understands, make her pallet a better one than canopied of Kings’—Shower with roses and defend all the lambs and war the wraithful doves around—I’m afraid to say what I really want to say.

  I dont remember how Gerard died, but (in my memory, which is limited and mundane) here I am running pellmell out of the house about 4 o’clock in the afteernoon and down the sidewalk of Beaulieu Street yelling to my father whom I’ve seen coming around the corner woeful and slow with strawhat back and coat over arms in the summer heat, gleefully I’m yelling “Gerard est mort!“ (Gerard is dead!) as tho it was some great event that would make a change that would make everything better, which it actually was, which granted it actually was.

  But I thought it had something to do with some holy transformation that would make him greater and more Gerard like—He would reappear, following his “death,” so huge and all powerful and renewed—The dizzy brain of the four-year-old, with its visions and infold mysticisms—I grabbed Pa and tugged his hand and glee’d to see the expression of likewise gladness on his face, so when he wearily just said “I know, Ti Pousse, I know” I had that same feeling that I have today when I would rush and tell people the good news that Nirvana, Heaven, Our Salvation is Here and Now, that gloomy reaction of theirs, which I can only attribute to pitiful and so-to-be-loved Ignorance of mortal brains.

  “I know, my little wolf, I know,” and sadly he drags himself into the house as I dance after.

  The undertakers presumably carry the little no-more-body of no-more-pain-and swelled-legs away, in a tidy basket, to prepare him for his lying-in-state in our front parlor, and that night all the Duluozes do drive up from Nashua in tragic blackflap cars and come to crying and jawing in the brown kitchen of eternity as suddenly in my mind, as tho it was only a dream, a vision in the mind, which it is, I see the whole house and woe open up from within its every molecule and become instead of contours of walls and ceilings and absence-holes of doors and windows and there-yawps of voices and lamentings and wherewillgo-beings of personality and name, Aunt Clementine, Uncle Mike, cousins Roland and Edgar, Aunt Marie, Pa and Ma and Nin at the lot, just suddenly a great swarming mass of roe-like fiery white-nesses, as if a curtain had opened, and innumerably revealed the s
cene behind the scene (“the scene behind the scene is always more interesting than the show,” says J.R.Williams the Out Our Way cartoonist), shows itself compounded be, of emptiness, of pure light, of imagination, of mind, mind-only, madness, mental woe, the strivings of mind pain, the working-at-thinking which is all this imagined death & false life, phantasmal beings, phantoms finagling in the gloom, goopy poor figures haranguing and failing with lack-hands in a fallen-angel world of shadows and glore, the central entire essence of which is dazzling radiant blissful ecstasy unending, the unbelievable Truth that cracks open in my head like an oyster and I see it, the house disappears in her Swarm of Snow, Gerard is dead and the soul is dead and the world is dead and dead is dead.

  I’ve since dreamed it a million times, down the corridors of Seeming eternity where there are a million mirrored figures sitting thus and each the same, the house on Beaulieu Street the night Gerard died and the assembled Duluozes wailing with green faces of death for fear of death in time, and Time’s consumed it all already, it’s a dream already a long time ended and they dont know it and I try to tell them, they wanta slap me in the kisser I’m so gleeful, they send me upstairs to bed—An old dream too I’ve had of me glooping, that night, in the parlor, by Gerard’s coffin, I dont see him in the coffin but he’s there, his ghost, brown ghost, and I’m grown sick in my papers (my writing papers, my bloody ‘literary career’ ladies and gentlemen) and the whole reason why I ever wrote at all and drew breath to bite in vain with pen of ink, great gad with indefensible Usable pencil, because of Gerard” (Écrivez pour l’amour de son mort) (as one would say, write for the love of God)—for by his pain, the birds were saved, and the cats and mice, and the poor relatives crying, and my mother losing all her teeth in the six terrible weeks prior to his death during which time she stayed up all night every night and grew such a mess of nerves in her stomach that her teeth began falling one by one, might sight funny to some hunters of conceit, but this wit has had it.

  Lord bless it, an Ethereal Flower, I saw it all blossom—they packed me to bed. They raved in the kitchen and had it their way.

  There’s the rocking chair, Uncle Mike’s wife had it, the peculiar dreary voice she had, fast way she talked, things I cant utter but I’d roll and broil in butter, the gurgle in their throats—I could recount the dreary yellings and give you all the details—It’s all in the same woods—It’s all one flesh, and the pieces of it will come and go, alien hats and coats not to the contrary—Uncle Mike had a greenish face: he had barrelsful of pickles in Nashua, a sawdust oldtime store, meat-hacks and hung hams and bas kets of produce on the sidewalk: fish in boxes, salted.—Emil’s brother,—“So vain, so full of ego, people—shut your mouth you” he finally says to his wife, “I’m talkin tonight—in the great silence of our father we’ll find the reasons for our prides, our avarices, our dollars—It’s better any way, now that he’s dead his belly doesnt hurt any more and his heart and his legs, it’s better”—

  “Have it your way,” says my father listlessly.

  “Ah Emil Emil dont you remember when we were children and we slept together and Papa built his house with his own hands and all the times I helped you—we too we’ll die, Emil, and when we’re dead will there be someone, one person for the love of God, who’ll be able to look at us in our coffins and say ‘It’s all over, the marde, the fret, the force, the strength’?—more’s the strength in the belly than anywhere else—finished, bought, sold, washed, brought to the great heaven! Emil dont cry, dont be discouraged, your little boy is better—remember you well what Papa used to say in back of his stove—”

  “With his bottle on Sunday mornings, aw sure that one was a smart one!” (the wife).

  “Shut your mouth I said!—All men die—And when they die as child, even better—they’re pure for heaven—Emil, Emil,—poor young Emil, my little brother!”

  They shake their heads violently the same way, thinking.

  “Ah”—they bite their lips the same way, their bulgey eyes are on the floor.

  “It ends like it ends”—

  My mother’s upstairs sobbing, lost all her control now—The aunts are cleaning out the death bed, there’s a great to do of sheets and an end to sheets, a Spring cleaning.

  “I brought him on earth, in my womb, the Virgin Mary help me!—in my womb, with pain—I gave him his milk!—I took care of him—I stood at his bedside—I bought him presents on Christmas, I made him little costumes Halloween—I’d make his nice oatmeal he loves so much in the mornings!—I’d listen to his little stories, I examined his little pictures he drew—I did everything in my power to make his little life contented—inside me, outside me, and returned to the earth!“ wails my mother realizing the utter hopeless loss of life and death, the completely defeated conditionality and partiality of it, the pure mess it entails, yet people go on hoping and hoping—“I did everything,” she sobs with handkerchief to face, in the bedroom, as the Bradleys, Aunt Pauline, her sister, come in, from New Hampshire, “and it didnt work—he died any how—They took him off to Heaven!—They didnt leave him with me!—Gerard, my little Gerard!”

  “Calm yourself, poor Ange, you’ve suffered so.”

  “I havent suffered like he did, that’s what breaks my heart!” and she yells that and they all know she really means it, she’s had her fill of the injustice of it, a little lame boy dying without hope—“It’s that that’s tearing my heart out and breaking my head in two!”

  “Ange, Ange, poor sensitive heart!” weeps gentle Aunt Marie at her shoulder.

  Nin and I are sobbing horribly in bed side by side to hear these pitiful wracks of clack talk coming from our own human mother, the softness of her arms all gashed now in the steely proposition Death—

  “I’ll never be able to wipe that from my memory!”

  “Not as long as I live!”—“He died without a chance!”

  “We all die—”

  “Good, damn it, good!” she cries, and this sends chills thru all of us man and child and the house is One Woe this night.

  Meanwhile, insanely, our cousins Edgar and Roland have sneaked off with the firecrackers to the backyard, and like leering devils, which they arent really, but as much as like satyrs and Mockers and be-striders of misfortune, there they are setting off all our precious firecrackers, Nin’s and mine and Gerard’s, at midnight, callously, a veritable burning of the books of the Duluozes, Ker plack, whack, c a ka ta r a k sht boom!

  “Les mauva, les mauva,” (mean! mean!) Ti Nin and I scream in pillows—

  The Bradleys are going to drive us to Nashua for the night and bring us back for the funeral in 48 hours—With Gerard and the firecrackers all gone, and Ma crying on the very floor, we had better be driven somewhere—

  When Ti Nin and I were little.

  Then comes the solemn funeral, Nin and I are taken back on a rainy dreary day to see the house all one great Gloom Shrine full of kids from the St. Louis Parochial School filing in and out in frightened parades, their eyes straining to see the deadface in the unholy velvet pillow among the flowers, the sooner they see it the quicker they’ll know the face of death and fears be justified all—And files of nuns, standing by the coffin, praying with long black wooden rosaries—All dolled up in little necktie I cant believe it’s my own house and this, this World Parlor with Histories of Black being written in it, the very selfsame silly drowsy parlor where I’d sat and goofed away whole long afternoons chubbling with my lips or going goopy goopy at the window passers, or with Gerard (whose head I hold no claim on any more) held head-to-head confabs and listened to the holy lazy silence of Time as it washed and washed forever more—But now, his bier a glory, in death all Splendidified, banished-from-hair-earth and admitted-to-Perfectness he lies, commemorating our parlor silently, tho no one knows precisely what I know—But others know some thing of him I never knew, the nuns, and some of the boys, and mayhap Père Lalumièr
e the Curé who now in the kitchen with one ecclesiastical blackshoe up on a chair and manly elbow on knee assured my mother “Ah well, be not anxious, Mrs. Duluoz, he was a little saint! He’s certainly in Heaven!”

  That was the reason for the big crowd, they came to see the little boy in the neighborhood who had died and gone to heaven, and housewives even that day began noticing and announcing that the flock of birds, the nation of phebes and peewits and meek and lowly whatnots that had pestered at his window for so long since Spring broke in, was gone—

  “They’re gone completely.”

  “You dont see one.”

  “It’s ‘cause it’s rainin!”

  But the next day, and the next day, and the next day after that, the little ones revisited no more the scene of the deicide—

  “They’re gone with him!”

  Or, I’d say, “It was himself.”

  Unforgettable the files of children come to see the cheek they knew so well in classrooms, to see its loss of lustre pink, and estimate the value of death—With what avid and horrified eyes they gazed on little Schoolmate so reposy silent in his ornate bed—What horror even just to approach the house and see the wreath, with the fatal pale blue ribbon, and the fatal drawn shades in the parlor—The vultures do feed on disconsolate such-rooftops when you look, the chimney exudes angels of fear like whirligigs of gray butterflies . . .

  What you learn the first time you get drunk at sixteen, tugging at old urinaters in Moody Street saloons and yelling “Dont you realize you are God?” is what you learn when you understand the meaning that’s here before you on this heavy earth: living but to die . . . look at the sky, stars; look at the tomb, dead—In invoking the help, Transcendental help from other spheres of this Imaginary Blossom, invoke at least, by plea, for the learning of the lesson:—help me understand that I am God—that it’s all God—Urinating, alone, wont get you far—It happens, every day, in all the latrines of Samsara—Here and Now, said the children seeing “Ti Gerard Duluoz qu’est mort”—“it’s not any harder’n that—they wont be able to punish me any more”—Beyond punishment, he lies, qualified for eternity and perfectness—“Is it true he’s dead?—mebbe he’s kidding”—and all the ghost feelings of men—But no, “that bareheaded life under grass” is no “blithe spirit”—It’s the genuine death.