Melissa Hardy

I have been advised that the best time to publish a blog post is Tuesday through Thursday and not Friday morning as I have been doing lo these many years. As Tuesday is, inexplicably, my favorite day of the week, I have decided that, from here on out, I will publish on a Tuesday rather than a Friday. For this last Friday, here’s an excerpt from my as yet unpublished novel, The Oracle of the Mountain, set in the early 1800’s in the Sibylline Mountains of Italy,  wherein Padre Eusebio, an elderly priest, attempts to dissuade Prior Bacigalupo from exorcising a witch on a Tuesday:

“But, Prior, it’s Tuesday! Tuesday!” the old man pleaded.

“And what in Heaven’s name is wrong with Tuesday?” Bacigalupo demanded.

“Every terrible thing that has ever happened to me personally happened on a Tuesday. It is my unlucky day.”

“It’s not just you, Padre,” Mama said. “Tuesday is everyone’s unlucky day. As my old Nonna used to say,’ De Venere e di Marte né si sposa né si parte’. Very unlucky to marry or embark upon a journey on a Tuesday . . . or a Friday, for that matter. That’s because Tuesday is named after Mars, the Roman god of war, and Friday is named after Venus, the goddess of love. Mars and Venus. Those two cause a lot of trouble!”

“See!” Padre Eusebio crowed. “Tuesdays are very bad luck. I’m not just making it up!”

“That’s ridiculous!” the Prior blustered. “We live in an age of reason . . . of science! There’s nothing wrong with Tuesdays! Tuesdays are a perfectly good sort of day.”

“They are a terrible, fearful sort of day,” the priest insisted. “Awful things always happen on a Tuesday!”

See you Tuesday!

An excised scene from Sabra the Astonishing, in which her father, Ananias Buck, encounters the Devil in the Basilica of San Marco in Venice.

San Marco

There arose from above and behind him a sound like asthmatic breathing, much amplified, followed by a sound like rotten gauze being rent. This, in turn, was followed by a low rumble punctuated by squeaks. Then tall organ chords began to crash all around him.

Ananias spotted a set of worn stone steps leading upwards – it was from here that the music emanated. As the unseen organist pumped out the sort of tune appropriate to horror films — now lugubrious, now thunderous – he mounted the stairs and found himself in one of the Basilica’s several choir lofts, dominated by an enormous Tamburini organ. A small man with a closely shaven head sat in front of the forest of bristling pipes. He was wearing a rumpled black suit, as shapeless as a priest’s and cut of the same slick, rusty cloth.

Ananias crept closer; he squinted.

A white-tipped cane lay propped against the balustrade; the organist wore dark glasses; he must be blind. He leaned into the keyboard, shoulders hunched, his fingers chasing one another down the keyboard like spiders seeking to top off a mating with a meal. His body bobbed back and forth as he pumped the heart of the great church with his dexterous feet.

The tune modulated into something recognizable. Berlioz’s Requiem? Ananias paused for a moment, waiting until he could positively identify the piece. Yes, it was the Requiem. Whenever he heard it, he had a vision of some nineteenth-century gentleman paddling a canoe through the sewers of Paris. That was how he envisioned Berlioz’s dark night of the soul. And his own? Well, that would this night, here.

He turned. The loft invaded the nave’s airspace in a network of narrow bridges. Over time the foundations of the Basilica had shifted and its floor had buckled; the bridges were far from level and so narrow that only a very meager person such as Ananias or a child could have hoped to negotiate them; nor did their banisters inspire confidence.

Interior, San Marco

Ananias set tentatively forth along one of the bridges, both hands gripping the crumbling railing. Above him vaults arched, lamps swung, gigantic figures swelled and billowed: Elijah; an hirsute Baptist; a ranting Amos, prophets all. Hunger stirred in his gut, becoming, through some subtle malevolent transformation, nausea. Colors dimmed and sharpened, sounds muted, then burgeoned. It was as though someone — not himself — was attempting to adjust the intensity of his perceptions with knobs or dials. He reached the end of the bridge and turned back to look back at the loft. That was the moment he remembered that he was scared of heights, had always been. No sooner had he realized this, than his knees liquefied and he sank into a deep squat. His eyes slid shut and he folded forward into a half-faint. It was all too much: the wallop of incense, the sweat of unwashed pilgrims, the crazed organ’s musical antics, this insubstantial bridge on which he now crouched — corridor of a nightmare, a bridge that went so far, then stopped mid-air. He dragged a limp, damp hand over his forehead, aware for the moment only of his heart, that inexorable pump, pounding away in his breast. Once, only once, had he been so conscious of a heart. A pet parakeet had died in his hand.   It had been horrible, that tiny death.

He blinked his eyes, adjusted his spectacles, and struggled to his feet. While he had been indisposed, another visitor had climbed the stairs to the loft. There he sat, in a metallic folding chair pulled up close to the organ, a gaunt, melancholy-looking gentleman of distinguished appearance, with thick white hair and refined features. His gaze was directed towards the organist, whose white-tipped cane he held in front of him; the fingers of his right hand curled around its handle; those of his left encircled the cane’s metal shaft. He wore evening clothes under an opera cape. Snow melted on the pointed tips of his well-polished black shoes.

Ananias recognized him instantly. He was the Devil. Who else could he be? What other stranger is so familiar?   And in that moment of recognition, he had also recognized something else, something momentous. The Devil was perfectly at home in this great church because this was his house. It might have been God’s house a long time ago, but it was no longer and it hadn’t been for a very long time. Ananias was reminded of Leon Foote, his brother-in-law the doctor. On fine days, Leon would instruct his receptionist to say that he was with a patient, then close the door to his office and sneak out the back, golf clubs in tow. Like Leon on a fine Spring day, God had skedaddled and the Devil had just moved on in.

The organ at San Marco

By this time he had managed to grab hold of the balustrade and haul himself back onto his feet. He stood there, swaying, clutching the railing with both hands.

As the organist rummaged brutally through an ominous arpeggio, the Devil glanced in Ananias’s direction. The glance was languid. Their eyes met. Even at a distance of some twenty five feet, Ananais could see that the pupils of his eye were so large that he could detect nothing in the way of iris. A spatter of bright red burned in the sclera of his left eye, giving him an indisputably sinister appearance. But his gaze . . . it was compassionate, even tender. Never in his life had anyone looked at him with such compassion.  The Devil then touched his own left cheekbone lightly amd nodded, as if to beg his pardon for the bright dot of blood in his eye.

Herms frequently sported genitalia.

A description of the family portrait gallery at Ararat, the fictitious mansion at the heart of Sabra the Astonishing, on which I am, yes, still laboring.

In the far corner of the gallery, Samson Carley’s herm rose up monumental from the shadows. Star-spangled porphyry, its feldspar crystals glittered in the moonlight that poured through the glass bubble of the greenhouse’s roof and washed the long corridor with glacial flows of light. Samson Carley, the Colonel’s only son, slower than he, more honorable, bore around with him the disgrace: his sister and later his daughter, married to a big-headed, stoop-shouldered, carpet-bagging Buck. He secretly blamed Ignatius for his own inability to produce an heir, try as he might, daughter after daughter after daughter, and Flavia, taffy-haired Flavia last of all. This similitude of Samson Carley, the likeness drawn from an old daguerreotype, scowled out at the hall, and, through the fronds of an artfully positioned palm, thrust out and upwards those cobra-like genitalia with which the sculptor Bosquet had endowed him, casting a monstrous shadow that stretched menacingly towards the living room door across the dappled Aubusson runner.

Up and down the length of the hall, tall shadows pressed against the cylinder of quivering moonlight. Out of this attendant darkness peered anxious faces, framed in gilt and ebony and illuminated by pin lights: Halliday Carley Buck, as plush and beribboned as a chocolate box; Ignatius, jaunty, meager, and suited in rusty black, hands folded over the top of a Malaccan cane; Colonel Bob, in full Confederate regalia — dove-grey uniform, yellow silk sash into which a pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle was thrust — fingering the hilt of a tasseled sword. And in the right-hand corner of the frame of each portrait a brass plate into which was engraved the subject’s name and that of the artist, their first tentative embalmer, who, like an embalmer, improved upon their looks with his small skills.

Down this gallery, which Da Silvio often likened to a pier to which ships hung lightly moored, bobbling in the current, equipped each with its figurehead: the Ignatius, the Halliday, the Colonel B (for the portraits inclined slightly from the wall over the faded rug and so encouraged this conceit), down this gallery trembled the shaft of white iced light, penetrating as far as the front hall which, running east to west, stretched along the southern facade of the house. There it ended in a blunted curve a little to the left of the hat rack and the intestine heap of Queen-Esther’s crocheting.

I am having a week in which I am feeling way too mortal. Hence the re-issuing of this 2014 blog post originally entitled, “A Sense of Foreboding.”

The day I helped move my then 78 year old mother and 82 year old father into The Cedars of Chapel Hill (or, as my father calls it, ‘The Last Resort’), Mother advanced grimly into the elevator brandishing a large kitchen knife  capable of wreaking considerable mayhem on vegetables and meat alike.  It was, as she was careful to point out, extremely sharp. I’m not sure why she felt she had to personally convey it to her new home.  Maybe she didn’t trust the moving company to pack it correctly.  Maybe she wanted an assurance she’d be able to make a break for it.

The facility was new and all around us milled future neighbours, also moving in, although not, it would appear, so heavily armed as my mother.  These were not the young old you see in ads for golf resorts or Grey Power. These were the old old, the target market for walk-in tubs, stair lifts and catheters – people wasting away, all right, but definitely not in Margaritaville. Not anymore.   We were joined on the elevator by an elderly man with a black eye.  We eyed the eye.  He eyed the knife. No one spoke.  “What happened to him?” my mother asked, when we were safely off the elevator.   Then she shook her head. “They’re all so old!”

I did not personally feel old until we moved into this house three years ago.  In part that was because my husband and I stayed in our “starter home” for almost twenty years.   In that house’s mirrors I looked more or less the age I had been when we moved in; this house’s mirrors told a different tale.   “Hello!” they said.  “You’re sixty years old!  What’d you mean, you hadn’t noticed?”

This realization was corroborated by the fact that people I knew started to die. People my age.   It began with a passing acquaintance from junior high. He started to leak Tea Party sentiments onto Facebook. Deciding he was off The Team, I swooped in to defriend him, only to encounter the following posting:

“Hello, Dad’s Facebook Friends, this is Jennifer, Danny’s daughter.  Dad died suddenly last night and I don’t know how I’m going to make it through the next few days.  He was my best friend and I already miss him SOOOOOO MUCH!!!”

If I were a religious person, I might have felt guilty, as though I were in some obscure way responsible for Danny’s demise.  Or perhaps  I would have felt all powerful, as if all I needed to do was think about defriending somebody, and poof!   Or maybe I would have felt vindicated, as in, “God clearly agrees with me that Danny was a horse’s ass and so He offed him!”

But I am not religious, so the whole incident just creeped me out.    I did end up defriending Danny.  It’s the only way to exorcise ghosts on Facebook.   However, his death turned out not to be an isolated case. He was followed in short order by another, dearer friend and then another.  Then a friend our junior by more than a decade had the temerity to die!  Thanks a lot, guy! (You know who you are.)

Both my husband and I began to feel what we describe as “a sense of foreboding.”  We wake in the morning and lie there for a few minutes, deep in dogs and feeling the foreboding settle on us life a suffocating blanket, a miasmal fog.  Am I going to die today?  I wonder.  Is he going to die? Will it be a heart attack?  Maybe an aneurism?  Will my upcoming physical result in a fatal diagnosis?  What about a car crash that leaves one of us paralyzed?  When will we be forced to leave this house that we love? How many years do we have left?  Is it years or is it months?

After my parents moved into the Cedars, the man on the elevator became my parents’ good friend.  Sam owned Kentucky racehorses and was married to a lively Holocaust survivor.  One day I was sitting on my parents’ balcony, looking out over the gardens when I saw Sam collapse in the roadway.  I jumped up in alarm and called out to my mother, “Sam’s fallen!”  White uniformed staff materialized as if by magic from behind the bushes and collected Sam, helping him to his feet and brushing him off.  Unfazed, my mother glanced down at the unfolding scene.   “He falls a lot,” she said.

Which explains the black eye.

Dad and his dog Poppet

Sam is gone now and so is Mom.  Then there’s my Dad,  ninety two this March, waiting out his days in Death’s antechamber like an old dog in the sun, biding the time that remains to him with remarkable equanimity and grace.  I sometimes try and imagine what his sense of foreboding must be, how it must feel to be him, to wake up every morning to find oneself, against all odds, alive.  I bet it trumps ours.

My mother (left), her sister (right). My cousins Lonnie, Jim and Sue (left to right)

I have been off for a week, seeing the ultrasound of our first grand child and celebrating my father’s 93rd birthday with him.  He and I spoke in passing of the uncle my family called ‘The Horse,’ and I remembered that I had written the following post about him back in 2013. 

My Uncle Leon was a mean man.  My mother and grandparents referred to him as, “The Horse.”  Later, after my aunt divorced him, she referred to him that way too. Uncle Leon didn’t believe in talking at the table and, if anyone dared break the silence, he’d snarl, “Dinner’s for eatin’, not talkin’.”  He used to beat my cousin Lonnie savagely with a belt.  My mother once interposed herself between him and Lonnie, declaring that no way she would let a man beat her children like that.  To which he replied, “Well, no way I would have married you, so get out of the way!”

Uncle Leon had polio as a child and walked with a lurch all his life.  This, according to my mother’s family, was what had made him mean – the struggle, the pain, the ensuing bitterness.  I disagree.  To be as mean as Uncle Leon, you had to be born that way. Maybe the fact that he’d grown up on an Oklahoma farm during the Dust Bowl had something to do with it.  Maybe what was good about him got stirred up by the wind and blown away with the topsoil.

Uncle Leon kept a revolver in the glove compartment of his car at all times.  He also made a practise of picking up hitchhikers.  I’ve often wondered what he thought would happen if the hitchhiker made a sudden move towards him.  Reach across and retrieve the gun from the glove compartment?   How would that work exactly? Did he fantasize about picking up a hitchhiker on a lonesome country road and then shooting him or her, just for the Hell of it?

I said he was mean.

After my aunt divorced him, he remarried and became an Evangelical Christian – in other words, double trouble – not only mean, but righteous.  My cousin Lonnie succumbed to lung cancer way too young, leaving instructions that he be cremated and his ashes divided in two – half to be scattered over the family farm and half over the Nascar Raceway – Lonnie was a mechanic who loved cars; people at the raceway had pitched in to help pay for his medical care and he was grateful.  Shortly after his widow received the ‘cremains,’ Uncle Leon paid her an unannounced visit and demanded that the ashes be divided into thirds.  He wanted to scatter a third over his new church’s graveyard so that Lonnie would end up in Heaven, where, presumably, he could beat him some more.  He came prepared.  By which I mean he brought a Pyrex measuring cup. He wanted just so much of what remained of his son.

Uncle Leon died on a treadmill during a stress test and the only thing good I have to say about “The Horse” was that he terrorized my brother and I into good dental hygiene.  Did I mention that he was a dentist?  And trust me, you didn’t dare have a cavity.