Silk Networks

In the modern era, sharp symmetrical lines, unembellished curves, and alternating current are in fashion. Applied science is making natural lighting history and photographing the appliances of a bright new tomorrow. But back when Penny loved Hudson it was in the glow of gaslight and by the heart of an open fire. Augie would have made the switch to the bright steady glare of the electric lamp and modernized the coal stove which, even when fully stoked, barely heated the lowest level, but his assets were frozen by the court and the home improvements had to stop.

There are only three shopping days to Xmas when the Swans open their present. Harry’s surprise opens his eyes as much as it does everyone else’s. The federal government is a lousy housekeeper. The custodian appointed by the court to look in on the place has kept the home fires, inadequate as they are, burning at a minimum. Outside it is a gray winter day, inside it is almost as damp and chilly. Over the years moisture—condensation in the oversized central room—has taken its toll. There is mold on the moldings and a dark green and damp fuzz growing on the stones of the walls and floors. Spiders spew silk networks in every direction, and there are creepy black holes in the baseboards that evidence marks long in the tooth.

They are all, in one way or another, bewildered, bewitched, and bothered by every fusty, time-worn detail. Overall the big hall they enter is cross-shaped. It gives Harry the faint, queasy feeling he gets when he goes into a Patriano Church, and so does the art built right into the walls. Starting in the reception area, the western transept, right down the verso face of the library wall, to the edge of the south alley entrance, then up and around the outside of the kitchen, ending in the right wing, the eastern transept, in counterclockwise sequence, is a series of fourteen rectangles of plaster set into the stone. The panels are painted to depict the stages in the quest of the perfect virgin knight Sir Stanislaus de Steele for the Bowl from which the Master Emanual took his final meal on earth. The Bowl is thought to be a repository of supernatural powers, most notably the gift of eternal youth. The Stations of the Supper Bowl, large sketchy paintings, cartoonish in florid colors, are rendered in excessive neoclassical detail. The theme, a high and tight celebration of austerity, is undermined by the ornateness of the style and the panel frames which are of cut stone worked into vines dripping in the decadence of the grape.

Sarah stays at Station I in the reception area. Here a dove is giving instructions to the ideal knight’s mother. Laudette, with Gloria in tow, crosses the hall drawn to number XIV, her favorite, outside the kitchen door. In this one, Sir Stanislaus, at the end of his quest, having won the Supper Bowl, is all aglow, juvenescent, with the X rays he is quaffing from that selfsame Holy Vessel. Harry is drawn to Station VII. By the south entrance: a depiction of the stainless saint’s famous trial by ordeal. At the midpoint of his journey Sir Stanislaus is held captive in a convent of nuns, nymphomaniac witches all. Illustrated in small vignettes within the panel, Sir Stanislaus, prisoner in their castle a year and a day, is subject to every torture of luxury and tenderness, yet he emerges in Supper Bowl VIII retaining his worthiness, still fully master of his animal nature, and thus able to continue his quest. The legend on his banner reads, “Without temptation, virtue is not remarkable.”

The Stations are by an artist named Throckmorton Bacon. Meant to be timeless, although painted only fifty years earlier, by modern standards they seem pitifully outdated. Still, like the cruciform shape and atmosphere of the house itself, there is something in them that stimulates Swan’s imagination. Harry assumes that Bacon meant the series to be ironic, for its flamboyance conveys the opposite of its apparant intention. The victory cup reminds him of the “cup” in “cupcake,” the dish he’d like to be eating out of this very moment. Where else would a man find his budtime always fresh but in the sweet, wine-red cup of the ever-loving female? But does Sarah see it? He fears that she, being dragged into this house to begin with, will see only its sad shape and none of its potential for sexy fantasy finishes.

“I’m sorry I didn’t look before I leaped,” he says. “The place is in worse repair than I expected. Sorry about that. But with a little effort no doubt we can make something of it.”

But Sarah is not asking what she can do for the museum. She has drifted from the foyer to the center of the cross, under the skylights, where the ceiling is high, and one can see the quadrangular covered walkways, the colonnaded halls of the other three stories. Open to the inside, the house Homer built so that the butterfly could have a ball towers above Sarah. She stands high-lit, in cloistral silence. The clouds move outside and for a moment the sun illuminates the rose- and amber-stained skylights. She lifts her veil, and lets her face bask in a shower of peachy rays. With, more or less, a shade of her former self back, she glows brightly like a ghost in a radiant soft red shift. No dust, rust, cobwebs, greenmold, or rats can spoil the feeling of home sweet home. She puts her lips together and lets out a long high whistle and listens to the echo. For the first time in their married life Harry sees her smile. But it is not an expression of joy, or even amusement. It is a faraway beam, a fractured grin moved by a spirit torn between being and nothingness.

However light the center, elsewhere around the first story darkness is the rule. As Hudson promised Penny, no windows at all along the river-side save in the kitchen where the small portholes were added for the sake of ventilation. And even in the library, downstairs parlor, and dining room, on walls which face other directions, the windows are small and, as if to shed light on the dark side of the mind, placed dungeon-style, transoms to be gotten at only by pole. At eye level the walls are unbroken blanks of marble.

As always Gloria makes herself scarce at home. The darkness doesn’t scare her. She can feel the power in the wings. With the watchful Miss Lord clomping after her, the baby Bee buzzes past the stone lions that silently stand guard at the foot of the stairs and flies up to the second story to check through all the rooms for secure nesting spots, nooks and crannies to hide in and be alone. She doesn’t have to go far to hit paydirt.

To left at the top of the stairs are several parlors. Meant to be reflective of an epoch which named itself excessive, they are styled after those popular in the courts of the Bon Vivants before the revolution, when Gourmet Kings built palaces where dining and decomposition made the sign of the cross, where decay and intrigue were celebrated in love-making and cuisine, and the fine artists, likening their sponsors to the luminaries of classical mythology, genuflected and kissed the rings and what-else of the lords and the ladies who commissioned them.

Red velvet drapes, heavy and elegant, hang like punctured windbags from big bluff balloon cornices but here the windows are large, lead-latticed casements, and the curtains threadbare to let in enough daylight for Gloria to see her way around.

In the Parlor of Angels the walls are painted with images of cloud-hopping cherubs, airborne children with heart-shaped buttocks, wings, baby-sized penises, and hairless scrota, shooting arrows of carnal desire, taunting and teasing one another, playing peek-a-boo behind streamers, clouds, and one another’s wings. Across the hall the theme is bosomy sea nymphs, naked lady-fish rising from a deep sea-spray blue. There are roses everywhere, even at sea, but the adjacent Parlor of Roses is a garden. Beds of them bordered with lavender fill the panels. The painted climbers on painted garden gates, reaching up the walls for the ceiling, are fading and dusty, yet they still seem to grow. The beauties spread out into the hall and collect themselves in a bouquet fantasia of symphonic proportions in what was Penny’s Anteroom, the Parlor of Cups. In this, the largest parlor, there are nine large panels. These show a lady being catered to in each of her three-times-three stages of love. No doubt her fine flitty features and diaphonous wide-sleeved gowns gathered at the wrist resemble those of Penelope King, who commissioned the murals from Claude Bougatti. Here she is, an immortal with a cornucopia of fleshy delights on her hands, in her cups, wining and dining as if in heaven, paradise illustrated as the most voluptuous of interiors, salons in which the tipsy queen reclines, semi-draped, on a soft cloud of pillows while drones, dark and turbanned, fan her with ostrich feathers and palm fronds. There are scenes of the fair milady at her vanity, pouting and powdering her nose, of her bathing, being dressed by her maids, receiving gentlemen at court, and in her bed with heavenly handsome boys all pricked up with the arrows of love, ready to refill her cup with nectar. The ceiling is vaulted and painted in flowery beds of clouds and sea foam. Erotic angels and sea nymphs sport amid garlands of flowers. In the vaults the perspective lines of air and sea and earth are stretched to a point, which, were they sentences, could only be described as bombast. In the center, at the peak of the vaults, like the sun itself, in gold leaf, is a loving cup: the goddess source from which those plots overflow, the hidden spring to which all life must return.

Thrilled with the rosy atmosphere, the eyes of Glory are wide with wonder. She is delighted to see in the center of each room, covered with a white dropcloth, like a ghost camp, is a jam of the big clumsy furniture that went with the deal: imperial antiques—sofas and chairs with cushions as overstuffed as geese bred for their livers, and tables with claws and paws carved at the end of their legs. This furniture and those drapes, the perfect items for her science of tentmaking, and such interesting old accouterments gives a plus to their perfection.

Laudette, who pulls up behind her, is offended by the overdecoration and scandalized by the open show of sex organs and the randy doodles on the walls. She does everything she can to shoo Gloria back downstairs, telling her to pay no mind to these silly pictures. But by this time the Swans have made their way up to join the baby-sitter and child. Harry is excited by the pictures and implications. Sarah still regards it all with a cracked grin. Laudette can’t understand why everyone else is agoggle. “No doubt, Sir Harry, as a decent man, you’ll have these walls painted over white the first chance you get.” Harry tells her that if anything he plans to have the murals restored and Laudette is just about to protest when Gloria, ahead of them all, already having made it to the bedroom, shrieks “Eeeeeaiiiiyiyi! Mummy, Daddy-o, Lawdy Lord, lookeeeeee!”

The suite of roses is a suite within a suite, a luxury bridal path that leads, through an arching, shapely vault, into the bedroom where, Ulysses, Penny, and Homer all breathed their last. Harry, Sarah, and Laudette enter and see what the Bee is buzzing about. All three have to whistle. Homer was a glutton for irony. He designed the queen butterfly’s chamber with himself rather than Ulysses in mind. In the southwest corner is an ocean liner of a bed, beyond king or queen size, it is a full, imperial size replica of the grand sleeping accommodation of Empress Theodora. Legend has it that this prodigious monarch slept in a crib large enough for a horse. Harry walks it off, the mattress is a curtained, canopied sixteen-foot square. Its four posts and massive headboard are tree-trunk-thick oak, carved into a medley of fancy and familiar themes, owls and doves, dolphins and snakes, hearts and flowers, cranes and storks, sea dragons, intertwined, riding on the curls of the waves of love. More than decoration, the bedposts, running from floor to ceiling, are part of the structure of the house. They are the pillars that keep that corner of the third story from falling into the first.

Perhaps you think that Art in Heaven is pulling our legs, talking with the license of a poet when he says how large the bed is. Having eyes like those timeless orbs lyricists dream of, plentiful pastures where bodies are assumed by exquisite music and beatific visions, my brother is often subject to speaking in metaphorical tongues, but in this case there is no hyperbole. When he says that this grandiloquent overstatement of a place to sleep is sixteen feet square he means every inch of it: the bed is literally as big as a small house. Big, yet it is something finite, part of this world although it has connections to the next. We can each personally attest to that. My brother and I, will someday be conceived and born in it.

Our grandmother Sarah takes an armful of oak, finds a pully and draws back the curtains. Sealed-in and unchanged for years, an atmosphere of nitrogenous vapor chains, green, cryptic, musty, and softly ticking with the mildew smell of a final resting place, rises. This air seems as if it could kill the living and bring the dead back to life. The bed linens, top and bottom six square yards each, and the lace-trimmed pillow cases, are yellowed and moth-eaten. Sarah plumps up a pillow and in the dust hears echoes of answers to her prayers; things come to her from beyond the senses. She puts her palm to the mattress. As if she were making some sort of connection, her deranged face brightens. Past and future presences meet in a mumble of memories and a jumble of intuitions. Here is a place, her heart sighs, where zeroing in on the dead has more than a ghost of a chance.

What’s more, the unborn live. My brother and I come to mind and already find ourselves gone.