Let Me Tell You: New Stories, Essays, and Other Writings Page 23

  I did make one attempt to rescue my play: I rewrote the ending, so that by means of magic Hansel and Gretel are transformed into sweet, dear, good, kind little kiddies, but the children threw it right out. Hansel and Gretel stay horrible to the end.

  Above everything else, I was desperately afraid that they would try to perform the play in public. I was quite sure that we would be everlastingly disgraced if that souped-up, cynical fairy tale ever reached a real stage, and the thought of being discovered as a fellow conspirator had me in terror. I managed to have any production of it put off until the fall school term, on the grounds that it was much too late in the year for any serious preparation, and I thought privately that the children had really had all the fun they wanted by just putting it together, and that by fall they would be interested in something else.

  Unfortunately, they took the songs to school, then began repeating lines from the play, and inevitably, finally, I found that copies were being mimeographed and passed around the seventh grade. I wanted to take a firm stand, but before I could make up my mind what to say I received requests from two local high schools for permission to put on the play. While I was still reeling, the principal of a private school thirty miles away called me to say she had heard about this play, and was there any chance of their performing it?

  I tried to tell everyone that it was a rather callous parody, cynical and full of slang, but all the teachers said the same thing: What a wonderful idea! The children will be really interested, and will actually enjoy a play that speaks their language.

  Well, it certainly does speak their language—much more so than the play about the fisherman’s wife who fears that her wretched hut will not withstand the rigors of the winter—and now that it exists I can’t seem to get rid of it. It is a defiant statement by a pack of children about their world and their acceptance of it. I finally gave in as gracefully as I could—I had the play copyrighted, including the lyrics and music, and gave it to the children. It belongs to them, as it should. I am going to stick to ghosts and bridge games and haunted houses, where I belong.

  The Ghosts of Loiret

  I love houses. I love to look at them the way they just stand there, and I most particularly love old and big and fancy houses. My grandfather was an architect, and his father, and his father; one of them built houses only for millionaires in California, and that was where the family wealth came from, and one of them was certain that houses could be made to stand on the sand dunes of San Francisco, and that was where the family wealth went. I don’t have any feeling, myself, about building houses; I don’t need to own them or live in them or even go inside; I just like to look at houses.

  I have an Egyptian scarab and I have a Japanese netsuke of a skeleton reading a book of poetry, and I have a crystal ball and a deck of tarot cards and a lot of tikis and eleven Siamese gambling house tokens and a book by Ludovico Sinistrari listing all the demons by name and incantation, and an Australian throwing knife and an incunabulum and a copy of Villon with shocking illustrations, and a small book by Currer Bell and an African boat harp and a skull from the Collyer mansion, and a wishing ring and three magic talismans—one for Thursdays only—and a necklace from the Congo made of tiny carved wooden skulls, and five black cats and an electric frying pan and four children, but I have had no good pictures of houses to look at.

  This year, when I realized this, my husband had already ordered my birthday present, which was to have been a Japanese scroll on rice paper in eleven panels showing the gradual decomposition of a dead body, but he canceled it and wrote instead to a British bookseller and ordered a collection of picture postcards of houses. These had been put up for sale by the heirs of one of those intrepid British travelers; I think of the man himself as a fellow house lover, gentle, observant, with a lap robe and a notebook with a silver pencil on a chain, always ready to toss an urchin a coin or bow to a lady on a bridge. This distinguished old person had wandered far, gathering postcards, and his heirs must have been most surprised when an urgent offer arrived from my husband in Vermont. I do not think that I was so excited even when the assegai came. Like all the presents my husband gives me, the postcards were even lovelier than I had imagined.

  With his hip bath and his bowler, my dogged friend had traveled extensively through England, France, and the United States, and had feasted those good British eyes on a vast range of great, old, and storied houses and taken their images home. The French houses were lovely slim châteaux rising above their little lakes, with magic names such as Annecy and Gruyères and Pontchardon, and the English houses were solid and straightforward, properly surrounded by lawns, and the American houses were lavishly decorated with gargoyles and classical pillars and gothic turrets. I dwelt lovingly on the Château de Menthon, on Beaumesnil and Nîmes; I gazed for a moment on the T. D. Stimson residence in Los Angeles, dreamed over Strawberry Hill, and looked into grottoes and Roman baths and summer palaces.

  Every time my husband gives me a present, I have to go and look something up in the Encyclopaedia Britannica; this time, I had to know about the ornamental writing across the front of Villesavin, what it said and what it was called and why it was there at all, but the encyclopaedia did not know, any more than it had known why my thunderbird necklace was made out of old phonograph records or how to get the strings back on the zither.

  Then, at a cocktail party, I met a French scholar, a charming native Vermonter who spends his holidays in France teasing the French people into thinking he has lived all his life in Paris. When I said to him “Can you tell me what it says, the writing on the front of the Château de Villesavin?” he stared at me, as, standing on the broad steps of Villesavin, overlooking the sweet gardens, he might have stared at a stranger approaching and saying “Can you tell me about the Elks’ Hall in the country of Vermont in the U. S. of A.?” The poor exile—his world did exist, then?—brightened and smiled. “You know the country?” he asked at once.

  “I have only pictures.”

  “Only pictures? But you must go there. To visit France…”

  “Alas.” I sighed. “I have an Egyptian scarab, but I have never seen a pyramid.”

  “A pyramid? In the south of France?”

  “Can you tell me what it says on the front of Villesavin?” (What do they read in the land of the Lilliputians; what is the news in Islandia, Megapolis, Utopia?) “What does it really look like?” I asked inadequately.

  He gestured at Vermont beyond the window. “Not like this,” he said.

  “Tell me about the houses.”

  “There is one place,” he said. “That one is haunted, haunted by—”

  “Well, old fellow,” said someone who wore a plaid jacket and carried whiskey in a glass, “when did you get back? Paris just about the same?”

  I finished my drink, and my husband took me home; they were singing “Auprès de ma blonde” in the corner. At home, looking my houses over again, I came to the château at Loiret and stopped, surprised. “Look,” I said to my husband. “Here are two people on the balcony at Loiret.”

  “Why not?” my husband said. “They probably live there.”

  “But there weren’t people in the picture before.”

  “M. R. James,” my husband said wisely. “You’ve been reading that mezzotint thing.”

  “I haven’t. And anyway his house was only a fine old English mansion. This is the Château du Loiret!”

  “They’re probably all haunted,” my husband said.

  “No,” I said. “Not my houses. Not my lovely Menthon. Not Villesavin. Not Beaumesnil or the James Flood residence in Menlo Park.”

  “Well, perhaps not Menlo Park.”

  “There simply should not be people on the balcony at Loiret. The windows are all closed and shuttered and the house is clearly empty, and those people have no business whatsoever to be standing there on the balcony.”

  “Go to bed,” my husband said unsympathetically.

  The next night I looked again, and there were no
people standing on the balcony at Loiret.

  When I had just finished my latest book, The Sundial, my husband and I were on our way to New York to spend three or four days talking to my publishers and such. It had been a long time since I’d last been to New York, and an even longer time since I’d been anywhere at all without my troops of children tagging along, and I was excited and a little bit nervous. When the train stopped at 125th Street, I glanced out the window to get my first sight of the big city and found myself looking squarely at the most hideous building I have ever seen. It was altogether disgusting, and I have no idea why that particular word came into my mind. It was a tall tenement building, standing alone, and staring at it out the train window all I could think of was that I wanted to turn around and go back to Vermont; I didn’t want to spend another minute in a city with that building in it. I pointed the building out to my husband, but he couldn’t see it; there were a number of other buildings around and he could not pick out this one before the train started, so he told me to calm down and try not to be so excited; we would be in the hotel in half an hour. As long as I could, I looked back at that unspeakable building, just wishing I would never have to see it or think of it again as long as I lived. I cannot really describe it. No one else, I expect, has ever seen it the way I did that afternoon. It was horrifying.

  I thought I had forgotten about it, in the confusion of arriving in the city and getting to the hotel, but that night I woke up from a nightmare about the building, one of those bad nightmares that get you out of bed to turn on the lights and make sure it was only a dream. All I could remember was that I had been dreaming dreadfully about that awful building, and from that time on I spent my entire time in New York dreading the moment when we would take the train home and pass the building again. It was so bad, finally, that we had to change our plans and take a night train, so that we would pass 125th Street in the dark and I wouldn’t see the building. It troubled me still after we were home, and finally I decided I had to find out about it, so I wrote to a friend of ours who teaches at Columbia University and described the building, asking him to locate it and find out if there was any reason why it should give me such an impression of horror.

  Finally, he wrote me that he had had trouble finding the building because it existed only from one particular point of view from the 125th Street station; from any other angle it was not recognizable as a building. Some seven months before, it had been almost entirely burned in a disastrous fire that killed nine people. What was left of the building was a shell. The children in the neighborhood said it was haunted.

  Then a postcard of one of the California houses began to bother me. It was an ugly house, all angles and all wrong. It was sick, diseased, and the photograph of it on the postcard made it look yellow and flabby. “I don’t like this house at all,” I said, showing it to my husband.

  “Very nice,” he said, reading. I should perhaps say that after having gotten me a crystal ball, he wouldn’t let me look in it while he was around, and, when the Sinistrari book came, he was unkind enough to refuse to translate the parts left in Latin, although he could have done it perfectly well; neither has he permitted me to put the Thursday talisman into his pocket on Thursday, which is his poker night, although every Friday morning he is forced to admit that he could have used it.

  “I don’t like this house at all,” I said again. “I wish it would go away, and not stay with my other houses.”

  “Throw it away.”

  “But I can’t, of course. That nice old man gathered it for a reason. He liked houses, and what would he think of me if I took his houses and started throwing them away? He might want them back.”

  “Very nice,” said my husband, reading.

  “And the encyclopaedia isn’t any help, because this house is in California, and when that encyclopaedia was written there wasn’t any such thing as California, and if only you didn’t insist on having just the eleventh edition—”

  “Amateurs,” my husband said. “Nothing after the eleventh can properly be called an encyclopaedia.”

  “But suppose I want to find out about this house in California—”

  “California?” said my husband, suddenly alert. “Are your mother and father coming again?”

  “No,” I said, “but of course you are right. I shall write my mother tonight about this house. If it exists in California, she may know of it. Thank you, my dear, for the splendid suggestion.”

  “Very nice,” said my husband, reading.

  I had not much time to look at my postcards for the next few days, after writing to my mother in California, because my husband gave me a book called Some Haunted Houses of England & Wales and I got involved in solving the mystery of Glamis Castle. As a matter of fact, I had almost forgotten writing her at all, and when her letter came I was pleased, because I thought she was sending me the recipe for my grandmother’s nut cake, but she only wrote that yes, she remembered that horrid house in California very well, although she was surprised to know that there were any pictures of it still around. My great-grandfather had built it. She remembered when the people of the town got together one night and burned it down.

  The next day, my husband and our older son, Laurie, came home from a walk and brought me a hickory leaf to use as a bookmark in Some Haunted Houses of England & Wales. There was no one on the balcony at Loiret.

  I found out about a haunted house in England where they had an heirloom skull kept in a box on the mantelpiece, and I told my husband about it. “Whenever they try to get rid of it,” I told him, “there are thunderstorms and the roof blows off and all the cows are barren until either they go and get it back again or it rolls back by itself and gets into its box.”

  “You have a skull from the Collyer mansion,” my husband pointed out.

  It sounded right. “We could get Laurie to put it in a bag or something and take it over and throw it in Lake Paran,” I said. “Then we would have thunderstorms and the roof would blow off and I guess all the cats would be barren.”

  “That’s good,” my husband said jovially. “That part about the cats being barren. You call Laurie while I get the stepladder.”

  The skull sits on the top shelf of a bookcase, on top of a volume of Dr. Dee’s Actions with Spirits. I called Laurie, and when he came his father said, “Help me with this ladder; we’re going to take Mother’s skull and put it in a bag and throw it into Lake Paran so there will be thunderstorms.”

  “All right,” Laurie said. “Except we’re going to look kind of silly throwing Mother’s skull into Lake Paran. People fish in Lake Paran.”

  But it would not come down. Neither would John Dee. My husband pulled and tugged and tried to shake it loose, and then Laurie got up on the stepladder and hit it with a broom, but it would not come down.

  “Well,” my husband said at last, “I guess we’ll just have to put up with the kittens.”

  “We’re better off anyway,” Laurie said. “If anyone had seen us going around throwing skulls into Lake Paran, they might not have liked it. People swim in there, too, you know.”

  “Let me show you the letter I got from my mother,” I said. “She forgot about my grandmother’s nut cake again. Laurie can throw something else into Lake Paran.”

  “Kittens,” my husband said.

  “Certainly not. Laurie, look and see if there are any people on the balcony at Loiret.”

  Laurie looked. “Yeah, there’s a couple of people,” he said. I raced to his side, and, indeed, the same two people were standing on the balcony.

  I began to wish that my English colleague had chosen his postcards a little more carefully. For a long time I watched for the people to return to the balcony at Loiret, but no one appeared. A nun kept looking out the window of Ballechin House, and that crazy buttress on The Priory, where Charlie Bravo died, came loose at one end and was just hanging there, and when I used a magnifying glass I could see Mrs. Cox looking out from the upper window, and once she waved; I didn’t like having M
rs. Cox wave at me. For one thing, the last person I seem to remember Mrs. Cox waving at was murder victim Charlie Bravo in 1876.

  I had a postcard of Borley Rectory and another picture of Borley Rectory in Some Haunted Houses of England & Wales, and the picture in the book was all right, but on the postcard a dining room window kept coming open and all the careful bricking-over they had done was wasted, because I could see clearly into the dining room, and what they must have thought in there, with me looking into the dining room through a magnifying glass, I can’t imagine. There was something gibbering on one of the battlements of Menthon, and over at Château de Kergrist the stones from that round tower at the end kept falling and falling.

  “I wish that skull would come down,” my husband said several times. “I don’t like having it stuck up there.”

  “That skull was the first present you ever gave me that didn’t have bookworms,” I said.

  “I just wish it would come unstuck,” he said.

  I was afraid that with the postcards going on the way they were, and the skull stuck up on top of John Dee, we might have some kind of trouble, even a poltergeist manifestation, but all that happened at first was that Laurie’s goldfish died, and that could have been because there was too much chlorine in the water. I have never liked the theory that poltergeists only come into houses where there are children, because I think it is simply too much for any one house to have poltergeists and children, so one morning when everyone was out, and the cellar door began to bang itself open and shut regularly, I was so angry that I looked up an incantation for the demon Vapula, who appears in the form of a lion with griffin’s wings and drives away evil spirits, and I typed up the incantation, the one beginning “Cara, cherna, sito, cirna,” and stuck it onto the cellar door with a piece of Scotch tape, and then I nailed the door shut and it stopped banging back and forth.