now when I bundle my chin in a warm scarf in a wet gale—I think on that comfort in the brown bathrobe–or as when a kitchen door is opened to winter allowing fresh ices of air to interfere with the warm billowy curtain of fragrant heat of cooking stove … say a vanilla pudding … I am the pudding, winter is the gray mist. A shudder of joy ran through me-when I read of Proust’s teacup–all those saucers in a crumb–all of History by thumb–all of a city in a tasty crumb–I got all my boyhood in vanilla winter waves around the kitchen stove. It’s exactly like cold milk on hot bread pudding, the meeting of hot and cold is a hollow hole between memories of childhood.
The brown that I saw in the bathrobe dream, and the gray in the shoeshop day, are connected with the browns and grays of Pawtucketville-the black of Doctor Sax came later.
12
THE KIDS YELLING in the tenement yards at night–I remember now and realize the special sound of it–mothers and families hear it in aftersupper windows. They’re slaloming the iron posts, I’m walking through them in that spectral dream of revisiting Pawtucketville, quite often I get in from the hill, sometimes from Riverside. I’ve come wearying out of my pillow, I hear pots rattling in kitchens, complaints of an elder sister in the yard becoming a chant, which the littler ones accept, some with cat meows and sometimes actual cats do join in from their posts along the house and garbage cans–wrangles, African chatters at murky circles–moans of repliers, little coughs, mothermoans, pretty soon too late, go in and play no more, and with my what-woe trailing behind me like the Dragon Net of Bad Dreams I come sploopsing to a no-good end and wakeup.
The children in the court pay no attention to me, either that or because I am a ghost they dont see me.
Pawtucketville rattles in my haunted head …
13
IT IS A RAINY NIGHT, on the Moody Street Bridge there’s poor old millhand Joe Plouffe. The night he was headed for Mill Pond mills with a lunch that he suddenly heaved far up into the night sky– G.J. and Lousy and I were sitting in the Friday evening park grass, behind the fence, and like a million times there goes Joe with lunchpail beneath brown auras of corner lamp with its illumination of every pebble and puddlehole in the street–only tonight we hear a strange yell, and see him throw lunch with a floosh-up of his arms and walk off, as lunch lands, he’s going to the bars of wild whiskey instead of the mills of drudgery–the only time we saw Joe Plouffe excited, the other time was in a suppertime basketball game, Joe on my side, Gene Plouffe on G.J.’s, the two brothers start hipping each other, whack, unobtrusive grinning use of hips packing great power that can knock you down and when littler Gene (5:01) gave him a good one bigger Joe (5:02) got red-in-face and slammed him a surreptitious hip that had Gene momentarily stunned and red, what a duel, G.J. and I were trapped pale among the titans, it was a great game–Joe’s lunch in fact landed about 20 feet from that very basketball bucket in the tree–
But now it’s a rainy night and Joe Plouffe, resigned, huddled, hurries home at midnight (no more buses running) bent against cold March rainwinds–and he looks across the wide dark towards Snake Hill behind the wet shrouds–nothing, a wall of darkness, not even a dull brown lamp.—Joe goes home, stops for a hamburger in Textile Lunch, maybe he ducked in our wrinkly tar doorway to light his butt– Then turned down Gershom in the corner rain and went home (as tragic roses bloom in rainy backyards of midnight with lost marbles in the mud). As Joe Plouffe lifts his heel from the last wood plank of the bridge, suddenly you see a faint brown light come on far in the night of the river–just about on Snake Hill– and beneath the bridge, slouching, dark, emitting a high laugh, “Mwee hee ha ha ha,” fading, choking, mad, maniac, caped, green-faced (a disease of the night, Visagus Nightsoil) glides Doctor Sax–along by the rocks, the roars–along the steep dump bank, hurrying–flapping, flying, floating, sweeping to the reedy flats of Rosemont, in one movement removing the rubber boat from his slouched hat and blowing it up into a little rowboat–goes rowing with rubber paddles, red-eyed, anxious, serious, in the gloom of rains and bat-spans and roar hush mist-masts—real river–keeping an eye on the Castle–as over the basin of that Merrimac with eager petite birdy wings bat-boned little Count Condu the Vampire hastens to his baggy dusty crumbled old girl in the unspeakable brown of the Castle door, O ghosts.
14
COUNT CONDU CAME FROM Budapest–he wanted good Hungarian earth to lie still in during the long dull afternoons of the Europe void–so he flew to America by rainy night, by day slept in his six-foot sand box aboard an N.M.U. ship–came to Lowell to feast on the citizens of Merrimac … a vampire, flying in the rainy night river from the old dump along back Textile field to the shores of Centralville … flying to the door of the Castle which was located on top of the dreaming meadow near Bridge and 18th. Upon the top of this hill, located symmetrically with the old stone castle-house on Lakeview Avenue near Lupine Road (and the long lost French Canadian hoogah names of my infancy) there stands a Castle, high in the air, the king surveyor of the Lowell monarchial roofs and stanchion-chimneys (O tall red chimneys of the Cotton Mills of Lowell, tall redbrick goof of Boott, swaying in the terminus clouds of the wild hoorah day and dreambell afternoon—)
Count Condu wanted his chickens plucked just right–He came to Lowell as part of a great general movement of evil–to the secret Castle– The Count was tall, thin, hawk-nosed, caped, whitegloved, glint eyed, sardonic, the hero of Doctor Sax whose shaggy eyebrows made him so blind he could hardly see what he was doing hopping over the dump at night– Condu was sibilant, sharp-tongued, aristocratic, snappy, mawk-mouthed like a bloodless simp, mowurpy with his mush-lips swelled inbent and dommer-fall as if with a little hanging Mandarin mustache which he didn’t have– Doctor Sax was old, his strength of hawk-shaw jowls was used on age, sagged a bit (looked a little like Carl Sandburg but shaped with a shroud, tall and thin in a shadow on the wall, not Minnesota road walking open air curly Gawd-damn glad in saintliness days and Peace–) (Carl Sandburg disguised with a dark hat I saw one night in the Jamaica Long Island Negro neighborhood, the Down Stud district, back of Sutphin, walking a long tragic lit up boulevard of islands and mortuaries not far from Long Island railroad tracks, just come in off a Montana freight train)–
The bat dissolved from the air and materialized at the door of the Castle a Vampire Count in evening cape. La Contessa de Franziano, a descendant of Welsh bwerps who fell off a trireme off the coast of Leghorn when it still had its Medieval wall guards, but claiming to be a pure Franconi of the old Medici heirs, came to the door gilt in rapid declining old lace with cobwebs joining threads and dust caking when she bent her back, with a pendant pearl and spider sleeping on it, her eyes all how-low, her voice all verbalisms in a reverberatory vat–“Dearest Count, you’ve come!” — she aims for the door with sobbing arms, opens it to the rainy night and few dull lights of Lowell ’cross the basin–but Condu stands firm, severe, prim, unemotional, Nazi-like, removing a glove–draws breath with a slight poof of the lips and a sniff-up–rattles–
“My dear, unemotional as I allegedly may be I’m sure the antics of the gnome girls don’t rival yours when old Sugar Pudding comes home.”
“Why Count,” tinkles Odessa the slave girl (Contessa in a camp) “how you do manage to be vivacious before evening blood–Raoul’s only now mixing the Divers—” (Divers of Odds & Ends).
“Is he with his old Toff in the belfry, meaning of course Mrs. Wizard Nittlingen damn blast her thorny old frap.”
“I guess so—”
“Has my box arrived from Budapest?” queries the Count (a mile away Joe Plouffe makes the Riverside corner before a gust of rain).
“… bureaucratic difficulties, Count, have prevented any likelihood of your box arriving before the Twelve-month.”
“Pash!”—slapping his gloves—”I can see this is going to be another abortive mission to find a fart for old fart face–scrawny-necked individual–who else is here?”
“Blook. Splaf his assistant goon loon. Mrawf the gone