my ghost, personal angel, private shadow, secret lover.
16
AT THE AGE OF SEVEN I went to St. Louis Parochial School, a particularly Doctor Saxish school. It was in the auditorium of this kingdom that I saw the Ste. thérèse movie that made stone turn its head–there were bazaars, my mother officiated at a booth, there were kisses free, candy kisses and real kisses (with all the local mustachioed Parisian Canadian blades rushing up to get theirs before they run off to join the Army in Panama, like Henry Fortier did, or go into the priesthood on orders from their fathers)— St. Louis had secret darknesses in niches… Rainy funerals for little boys, I saw several including the funeral of my own poor brother when (at age 4) my family lived exactly on the St. Louis parish on Beaulieu St. behind its walls… There were dignified marvelous old ladies with white hair and silver pince-nez living in the houses across the school–in one house on Beaulieu, too … a woman with parrot on varnished porch, selling middleclass candies to the children (discs of caramel, delicious, cheap)—
The dark nuns of St. Louis who had come to my brother’s hoary black funeral in a gloomy file (in rain), had reported they were sitting knitting in a thunderstorm when a ball of bright white fire came and hovered in their room just inside the window, dancing in the flash of their scissors and sewing needles as they prepared immense drapes for the bazaar. Incredible to disbelieve them … for years I went around pondering this fact: I looked for the white ball in thunderstorms–I understood mysticism at once– I saw where the thunder rolled his immense bowling ball into a clap of clouds all monstrous with jaws and explosion, I knew the thunder was a ball–
On Beaulieu St. our house was built over an ancient cemetery—(Good God the Yankees and Indians beneath, the World Series of old dry dusts). My brother Gerard was of the conviction, ark, that the ghosts of the dead beneath the house were responsible for its sometimes rattling– and crashing plaster, knocking pickaninny Irish dolls from the shelf. In darkness in mid-sleep night I saw him standing over my crib with wild hair, my heart stoned, I turned horrified, my mother and sister were sleeping in big bed, I was in crib, implacable stood Gerard-O my brother … it might have been the arrangement of the shadows. —Ah Shadow! Sax!—While I was living on Beaulieu Street I had memories of that hill, and Castle; and when we moved from there we transferred to a house not far from an across-the-street haunted Pine ground with deserted Castle-manse (near a French bread-bakery back of woods and skating ponds, Hildreth St.). Presentiments of shadow and snake came tome early.
17
ON BEAULIEU STREET I have a dream that I’m in the backyard on a spectral Fourth of July, it’s gray and somehow heavy, but there’s a crowd in the yard, a crowd of people like paper figures, the fireworks are being exploded in the grassy sand, pow!—but somehow too the whole yard is rattling, and the dead underneath it, and the fence full of sitters, eyerything rattling like mad like those varnished skeletal furnitures and the unfeeling cruel uncaring rattle of dry bones and especially the rattle of the window when Gerard said the ghosts had come (and later Cousin Noel, in Lynn, said he was the Phantome d’l’Opéra mwee hee hee ha ha, gliding off around the goldfish bowl and glazed fish picture over mahogany mountains in that dreary Lynn churchstreet home of his mother’s)—
18
AND YET DESPITE ALI THIS RACKETY GRAY when I grew to the grave maturity of 11 or 12 I saw, one crisp October morning, in the back Textile field, a great pitching performance by a husky strangely old looking 14-year-older, or 13,—a very heroic looking boy in the morning, I liked him and hero-worshipped him immediately but never hoped to rise high enough to meet him in those athletic scuffles of the windy fields (when hundreds of less important little kids make a crazy army benighted by individual twitchings in smaller but not less tremendous dramas, for instance that morning I rolled over in the grass and cut my right small finger, on a rock, with a scar that stays vivid and grows with me even now)—there was Scotty Boldieu on the high mound, king of the day, taking his signal from the catcher with a heavy sullen and insulting look of skepticism and native French Canadian Indian-like dumb calm—; the catcher was sending him nervous messages, one finger (fast ball), two fingers (curve), three fingers (drop), four fingers (walk him) (and Paul Boldieu had enough great control to walk em, as if unintentionally, never changing expression) (off the mound he may grin on the bench)— Paul turned aside the catcher’s signals (shake of head) with his French Canadian patient scorn, he just waited till the fingers three (signal for drop), settled back, looked to first base, spit, spit again in his glove and rub it in, pluck at the dust for his fingertips, bending thoughtfully but not slowly, chewing on his inside lip in far meditation (may be thinking about his mother who made him oatmeal and beans in the gloomy gray midwinter dawns of Lowell as he stood in the dank hall closet puttin on his overshoes), looks briefly to 2nd base with a frown from the memory of someone having reached there in the 2nd inning drat it (he sometimes said “Drat it!” in imitation of B movie Counts of England), now it’s the 8th inning and Scotty’s given up two hits, nobody beyond second base, he’s leading 8-0, he wants to strike out the batter and get into the ninth inning, he takes his time–I’m watching him with a bleeding hand, amazed–a great Grover C. Alexander of the sandlots blowing one of his greatest games—(later he was bought by the Boston Braves but went home to sit with his wife and mother-in-law in a bleak brown kitchen with a castiron stove covered with brass scrolls and a poem in a tile panel, and Catholic French Canadian calendars on the wall). —Now he winds up, leisurely, looking off towards third base and beyond even as he’s rearing back to throw with an easy, short, effortless motion, no fancy dan imitations and complications and phoniness, blam, he calmly surveys the huge golden sky all sparkle-blue rearing over the hedges and iron pickets of Textile Main Field and the great Merrimac Valley high airs of heaven shining in the commercial Saturday October morning of markets and delivery men, with one look of the eye Scotty has seen that, is in fact looking towards his house on Mammoth Road, at Cow Field–blam, he’s come around and thrown his drop home, perfect strike, kid swinging, thap in the catcher’s mitt, “You’re out,” end of the top of the 8th inning.
Scotty’s already walking to the bench when the umpire’s called it—”Ha, ha,” they laugh on the bench knowing him so well, Scotty never fails. In the bottom of the 8th Scot comes to bat for his licks, wearing his pitching jacket, and swinging the bat around loosely in his powerful hands, without much effort, and again in short, unostentatious movements, pitcher throws in a perfect strike after 2 and 0 and Scotty promptly belts it clean-drop into left over the shortstop’s glove–he trots to first like Babe Ruth, he was always hitting neat singles, he didn’t want to run when he was pitching.
I saw him thus in the morning, his name was Boldieu, it immediately stuck in my mind with Beaulieu–street where I learned to cry and be scared of the dark and of my brother for many years (till almost 10)—this proved to me all my life wasn’t black.
Scotty, named that for his thrift among 5¢ candy bars and 11¢ movies, sat in that wrinkly tar doorway with G.J., Lousy and me–and Vinny.
19
VINNY WAS AN ORPHAN for many years ere his father came back, got his mother out of some tub-washing strait, reunited the children from various orphanages, and re-formed his home and family in the tenements of Moody–Lucky Bergerac was his name, a heavy drinker, cause of his early downfalls as well as Old Jack O Diamonds, got a job repairing rollercoasters at Lakeview Park– what a wild house, the tenement screeched– Vinny’s mother was called Charlotte, but we pronounced it Charlie, “Hey Charlie,” Vinny thus addressed his own mother in a wild scream. Vinny was thin and skinny boyish, very clean featured and handsome, high voiced, excited, affectionate, always laughing or smiling, always swearing like a son of a bitch, “Jesus Crise goddam it Charlie what the fuck you want me to do sit in this fucking goddam bath tub
