Doctor Sax (18 page)

BAGGYPANTS JOURNEYMEN INVENTORS OF THE WORLD
couldn’t have been able to solve the riddle of the flood even if they had a union– Make a study:—along the shore of the presdigitator water-measurer on the canal there was nothing but water, the gimmick was drowned, the alley between redbrick warehouses leading to the grimy door of my father’s front floor hall-chamber with wagon wheels and wrinkly coaldust basement groundfloor for a red carpet to the Boss–it was all one vast and ghastly swimmingpool made of mud, straw, cotton, machine oil, ink, piss and rivers–

STAVROGIN HUNGRY MY FILIAL BROTHER
was lost in the mud rats–I heard that Joe was off somewhere with a .22 rifle hunting rats, there was a bounty being paid, talk was up about a mass Typhoid inoculation–everybody had to take
these shots, G. J. and I were terribly sick and arm-swollen from them that following week–

MY FATHER
, Ma and Nin, and I, the car parked behind us, are standing on a high parapet street down by White Street surveying below us the brown water rising to the second floor level of houses just like our own on Sarah Avenue and the poor families like us that were out of a house,—well all they gotta do now is go bohemianing in the candlelight like all Mexico,—White Street was the name of Mrs. Wakefield’s street, it was now Brown Street,—down towards the river you can see the arm of water inrushing and how it all happened, all coming from great seas of flood reported up-river–

“Bon, ca sera pas terrible ca avoir l’eau dans ta chambre a couchez aussi haut que les portrats sur T mur”
said my father—(Well, wouldn’t that be terrible to have water in your bedroom as high as the pictures on the wall!) I stood close to him for protection, love and loyalty. A fly buzzed.

MRS. MOGARRAGA THE IRISH WOMAN
who lived in the little white bungalow in Rosemont was heard declaiming as she moved out of her piano parlor in a rowboat, “Bums and kit’s kaboodles they are, the slimes of Arrah, to make trousers of themselves in the general pants bottoms Gomorrah
of their filthy hovel house–it’s the Lord brought the Flood to wash the wretches out like cockroach! Bottles in their bedspreads, beans in their bedbugs, batty–I’d as soon sweep them out with me broom”— (referring to her boarders) (clutching her cat to her bosom God bless her huge delight)— A ripple of laughter rises from the floodside crowd.

EUGENE PASTERNAK
, mad with love of his stride-howl midnights, comes furiyating down the slime path in hod’s man’s boots with a flume of essence in his air—”Geeyaw! The groolemen make my single dole ring soul make out–containt my comp! save my bomp!”—and disappearing in the back shacks (in a shimmy dance like a comedian leaving the stage).

IN SEARS ROEBUCK
and hardware stores people stomped around by the light of gray afternoon and bought boots, rubbers, fiddled among rakes, cape, gloomrain gear–something like a dirty splotch of ink hung in the sky, the flood was in the air, talk in the streets–views of water at distant street-ends all over town, the great clock of City Hall rounded golden silent in the dumb daylight and said the time about the flood. Puddles splashed in traffic. Unbelievably now, I returned to see the flood still rising–after supper
—the mighty roar beneath the bridge was still there, casting mist up in an air sea–brown torrent mountains falling in–i began to be afraid now of watching under the bridge- Huge tormented logs came careening from the moil of upriver falls and consequence, lurched up and down like a piston in the stream, some huge power was pumping from below … glistened in its torments. Beyond I saw the trees in the tragic air, the scene rushed on dizzily, I tried to follow filthy brown wave crests for a hundred feet and got dizzy and like to fall in the river. The clock drowned. I began to dislike the flood, began to see it as an evil monster bent on devouring everyone–for no special reason–

I wished the river would dry up and become the swimming hole of summer for the heroes of Pawtucketville again, right now it was only fit for the heroes of Punic War II—But it kept roaring and rising, the whole town was wet. Gigantic diving barn roofs suddenly submerging and rising again huge and dripping elicited “Ooohs & Aaahs” from watchers on the shore– March raged to her fury. The mad moon, a crescent hint, sliced thinly through the rayward crowds of cloud that boosted themselves in an east wind across the skies of disaster. I saw a lonely telephone pole standing eight feet deep, in thin rain.

On the porch of my house I knew in meditative revery that the roar I heard in the valley was a catastrophic roar —the big tree across the street added his multiform Voice of leafy to the general sigh sad of March–

The rain fell in the night. The Castle was dark. The knotty limbs and roots of a great tree growing out the side
of a pavement near the ironpickets of old downtown Lowell churches made a faint glimmer in the streetlamps.— Looking at the clock you could envision the river behind its illuminated disk of time, its fury rush over shores and people–time and the river were out of joint. Hastily, at night, at the little green desk in my room, I wrote in my diary: “Flood going full force, big brown mountain of water rushing by. Won $3.50 today Pimlico show bet.” (I also kept my bets going in the imaginary bankroll that lasted years—) There was something wet and gloomy in the green of my desk (as brown darkness flared in the window where my mudblack apple tree branches reached in to touch my sleep), something hopeless, gray, dreary, nineteen-thirtyish, lostish, broken not in the wind a cry but a big dull blurt hanging dumbly in a gray brown mass of semi late-afternoon cloudy darkness and pebble grit Void of sweaty sticky clothes and dawg despair–something that can’t possibly come back again in America and history, the gloom of the unaccomplished mudheap civilization when it gets caught with its pants down from a source it long lost contact with–City Hall golf politicians and clerks who also played golf complained that the river had drowned all the fairways and tees, these knickers types were disgruntled by natural phenomena.

By Friday the crest had been passed through town and the river starts going down.

“But the damage has been done.”

A STRANGE LULL
took place–after the Flood and Before the Mysteries–the Universe was suspending itself for a moment of quiet–like a drop of dew on the beak of a Bird– at Dawn.

By Saturday the river is gone way down and you see all the raw marks of the flood on wall and shore, the whole town is soaked, muddy and tired– By Saturday morning the sun is shining, the sky is piercingly heartbreakingly blue, and my sister and I are dancing over the Moody Street Bridge to get out Saturday morning Library books. All the night before I’ve been dreaming of books–Im standing in the children’s library in the basement, rows of glazed brown books are in front of me, I reach out and open one–my soul thrills to touch the soft used meaty pages covered with avidities of reading–at last, at last, I’m opening the magic brown book–I see the great curlicued print, the immense candelabra firstletters at the beginnings of chapters–and Ah!—picture of rosy fairies in blue mist gardens with gingerbread Holland skylark rooftops (with
breadcrumbs on them), talking to wistful heroines about the mean old monster on the other bosky side of the dale —”In another part of the forest, mein princess, the lark’s largesse is largely hidden”—and other sinister meanings– shortly after dreaming that I dive into dreams of upper hills with white houses slashed across by rays of a Maine sun sending sad redness over pines in a long highway that goes unbelievably and with … remorse … jump off the bus so I can stay in little Gardiner town, I bang at shutters, that sun’s same red, no soap, the people of the north are silent, I take a freight train to Lowell and settle on that little hill where I rode my bicycle down, near Lupine Road, near the house where batty woman had the Catholic altar, where–where— (I remember the statue of the Virgin Mary in her livingroom candlelight)—

And I wake up in the morning and it’s bright March sun —my sister and I, after hurried oatmeals, rush out in the fresh morning not unenlivened by the dew-residue of the river in its muddy slaw down by the tearful shore–Nature’s come to pet and woo poor billywoo in the river valley-golden clouds of blue morning shine above the decay of the flood–little children dance along the washlined neighborhoods, throw sunny rocks in muddy rivers of the turtle day,— In a Susquehanna special river shore on Riverside Street-a-Dreams, legitimate, I saunter along with my sister to the library, throwing scaled rocks on the river, drowning their flight in mud floodwaters of greenly corpses bumping– Sailing along and jumping in the air we dally to the library, fourteen–

I come home from the library that morning, up Merrimac
Street with Nin. At one point we veer off to Moody Street parallel. Ruddy morning sun on stone and ivy (our books firm under our arms, joy)—the Royal Theater we pass, remembering the gray past of 1927 when we went to movies together, to the Royal, free because Pop’s printing press that printed their programs was in back, early days, the usher upstairs niggerheaven balcony where we sat had raspy voice, we waited impatiently for 1:15 movie time, sometimes arrived 12:30 and waited all that time looking at cherubims in the ceiling, round Moorish Royal Theater pink and gilt and crystal-crazy ceiling with a Sistine Madonna around the dull knob where a chandelier should be,—long waits in rickety nervous snapping bubblegum seat-scuff Seattle tatter
“Shaddapl”
of usher, who also had hand missing with a hook at the hump World War I veteran my father knew him well fine fellow–waiting for Tim McCoy to jump onscreen, or Hoot Gibson, or Mix, Tom Mix, with snowy teeth and coalblack eyebrows under enormous snow white bright blinding sombreros of the Crazy Hollywood silent West–leaping thru dark and tragic gangs of inept extra-fighters fumbling with beat torn vests instead of bright spurs and feather-holsters of Heroes–
“Gard, Ti Jean, le Royal, on y alia au Royal tou le temps en?—on faisa ainque pensee allez au Royal–as t’heur on est grandis on lit des livres”
(Look, Ti Jean, the Royal, we used to go to the Royal all the time hey?—that’s all we thought about go to the Royal–now we are grown up we read books.) And we trip along gaily, Nin and I, past the Royal, the Daumier Club where my father played the horses, Alexander’s meat market on the canal now in the
Saturday morning all mad with a thousand mothers milling at the sawdust counters. Across the street the old drugstore in an ancient wood Colonial block house of Indian times showing jockstraps and bedpans in the window and pictures of the backs of venereal sufferers (made you wonder what awful place they’d been to get such marks of their pleasure).

“I never did forgive you for that time you hit me on the head with a marble Ti Jean,” Nin is saying to me, “but I will never hold it against you–but you hit me on the head.” I had, too, but if with Repulsion, champion of the Turf, she wouldn’t be saying it without a lump on her head. Luckily I used a regular marble not the ballbearing–I flew into an awful rage because Ma had sent her up to clean my room, Saturday morning 11 o’clock when smells of boiling’s on stove and I was settled for my game and cried when I saw the Meet (with 40,000 on hand) was going to be postponed, but she was adamant, so I confess before the judgment of the eternities I threw a marble (Synod, owned by S & S stables) right at the top of her head. She ran down crying–I was severely jostled by my irate mother and made to sit and sulk on the porch awhile—”Va
ten dehors mechant! frappez ta tite soeur sur la tête comme col Tu sera jamais heureux être un homme comme ca.”
(Go on outside, bad! hitting your little sister on the head like that! You’ll never be happy being a man like that!) Doubtful that I ever grew up, too. I’m worried.

“Eh bien
Nin,” I say,
“faura du pas faire car
(Well Nin, I shouldn’t a done that.)

We come to the St. Jean Baptiste church and Nin wants
to go in for a second to see if the third-grade girls at St. Joseph for girls are having their Lenten exercises, wants to check on her girlfriend’s little sister–ah the poor little girls of Lowell I knew that died, at 6, 7, 8, their rosy little lips, and little eye glasses of school, and little white collars and Navy blue blouses, all, all, underdusted in fading graves soon sinking fields–ah black trees of Lowell in your March glare–

We peek in at the church, at shuffling groups of Little girls, at priests, people kneeling, doing the sign of the cross in aisleways, the prim flutter of front altar lights where a pursymouth youngpriest wheels sensationally to kneel and hangs knelt like a perfect motionless statue of Christ in the Agony of the Garden, budging for just an instant as he barely loses balance and all little kids in church who watched have seen, the sensational wheel failed, I notice all this just as I slip out the door–after Nin with a flick at the fount-waters and quick cap-on (my cap was an old felt hole-hat).

Bright morn blanked our eyelashes right there, inside the church perpetual afternoon, here: morning… But as we proceeded right on Aiken Street and left up on Moody the day stretched to noon with a faint whitish glare now come into the halyards of the blue and the trumpets have stopped sounding, half lost their dew–always hate morning going– The women of Moody Street were rushing and shopping literally in the shade of the Cathedral–at Aiken and Moody, center of traffic activities, it cast its huge bloat shadow on the scene–climbing a tenement or two in shadow-vertical-extenuation lengthening with afternoon. Nin
and I gaped at the drugstore window: inside, where neat black and white tiles made a golden sun floor for the drugstore, and where the strawberry ice cream sodas were foaming at the top in pink bubblous mist froth at the slavering mouth of some idle traveling salesman with his samples on the stool, soda in glass sitting in steel glass-grip with round clinky girderbottom, a solid soda, huge, oldfashioned, with a barbershop mustache on it, Nin and I sure wished we could get some of that. Joy of the morning was particularly keen and painful in the marble slab counter where a little soda was freshly spilled–I romped, we romped on up the Moody. We passed several regular journeyman Canadian grocery stores crowded with women (like our Parent’s) buying hamburger and huge pork chops of the prime (to serve with hot mashed potatoes in a plate in which also hot porkchop fat is floating around beautiful with luminescent golds to mix with the mash of hot palate, add pepper). In fact Nin and I grow hungry remembering all our long hikes to the Royal, looking at sodas, walking, seeing the women buying sausage and butter and eggs in the grocery stores.
“Boy mue faimer a ben vite, tu-suite”
Nin says rubbing her dress over her belly (Boy me I’d like real soon, right away—)
“un bon ragout ctboullette, ben chaud
(a good porkball stew very hot)
dans mon assiette, / prend ma fourchette pis jell mash ensemble
(in my plate, I take my fork and I mash it together),
les boules de viande molle, les patates, les carottes, le bon ju
grew,
apres ca fma bien du beur sur mon pain pis un gros vert de la—”
(the balls of soft meat, the potatoes, the carrots, the good fat
juice, after that I put a lot of butter on my bread and a big glass of milk—)