The Pox Party Page 2

  This was 03-01’s ideal, and he pursued it with all those men who came to our academy.

  I recall, as an example of this pursuit, an occasion when he arranged that we should go out into the countryside and take our supper beneath the summer sun. It was not an event of much moment; but my memory of it is clear, and it will act as a serviceable specimen of the conversations among our academicians.

  We went out in several carriages and an open cart full of scholars. A few had brought their own carriages, attended by their own wives, who had organized the collation. All of those virtuosos still unwed, however, young or old, wished to be seated next to my mother in Mr. 03-01’s carriage, and it took some time, us standing in the stable-yard while they each put in their bid, before we could even embark.

  One wished to sit with her and Mr. 03-01 so he could speak about the appropriation of funds for a refracting telescope and octant; another had committed to memory a passage of Lucretius and wished to recite it with gestures; the music-master would sing; the botanist would speak on stamens; Mr. 07-03, the painter, wished to sketch while we drove, and said the cart would bounce too much for his already palsied hands.

  Amidst this chaos of demand, 03-01 raised his finger, and pointed at the one man who had remained silent — an elderly philosophe named Dr. Trefusis, 09-01 — and said, “Yes — 09-01 shall go with us.”

  07-03 protested, “09-01 made no request, sir.”

  03-01 replied sharply, “Precisely. He is withered and his seminal vesicles eaten away entirely by the clap. He is the only one of you who will not succumb to love and spend the next hour ogling the Princess’s bosom. Come!”

  “I might still love her,” 09-01 pointed out. “Hm? Who is to say that love must move through the loins to stir the heart?”

  “He might,” agreed 07-03.

  “Indeed, sirs,” mused another, “is love grounded in the body or in the intellect?”

  “Or in the spirit?” added yet another.

  “Is the spirit also the intellect?”

  “And in truth, could we but —”

  “Horsewhip!” 03-01 sang out gaily, holding one aloft, and the company silenced itself. He ordered, “Princess Cass — Octavian — Dr. 09-01, sir — into the carriage. We are off.”

  The ride was pleasant, though the road was wet in some places and rutted. My heart dilated at the prospect of travel through the streets of the town. The floating lights and miraculous gasses of our house did not intrigue me, being so familiar; but the trains of servants running through the streets with baskets of leeks, or the poles strung with dead hares, the ladies in their finery walking arm-in-arm — these filled my mind with questions, as if they were the most recondite of earthly tableaux.

  There was little that did not excite my interest in these urban scenes: the broad avenues animated with the clamor of sales and traffic; the narrow alleys; the horses and fine equipages; the ladies carried through the streets in their chaises, their wigs high and as ornamental as shrubberies; the fishermen on the wharves; the persons of all races that milled upon the teeming docks; and even the urchins who, smeared with dirt and salt, played coachman in the gutters, a frolic that seemed to me, in my naïveté, delightful in the highest measure.

  I fairly hung out the window, so eager was I to see the world that passed outside our walls; 03-01 indulgently did not scold my curiosity.

  We made our way down Orange Street and through the city gates, across the marshy Neck to the mainland. We soon had left behind us the warehouses and the reeking tanneries, and traversed pastureland on muddy tracks.

  There is no refreshment more gratifying to the soul than the sight of Nature in her summer finery, before the heat is at its most intense. She is soothing, but not soporific; intoxicating without inebriation.

  We made our way through the fields. Laborers were cocking the hay for the first harvest. 03-01 and 09-01 watched them with some interest and exchanged views on haymaking and the weather.

  When we reached the spot 03-01 had designated for our supper — a spreading oak that would afford us all shade from the afternoon sun — we stopped, and the footman helped us step down. The master’s valet, 24-06, made good the preparations for the feast on blankets lain on the grass.

  It was an afternoon that I shall long remember, not due to any incident remarkable for change and calamity, but rather because in the regularity of its pulse it suggested health and good humor, in a way that so many of my days, spent stammering out Latin in dark rooms, did not.

  The supper was served. We ate, and the men reclined around my mother, with scarcely a look at the several wives who were present — 11-02, for example — notwithstanding, I reflected as I ate my slice of ham, it was they had planned the menu and organized its transportation. The other women gathered a ways off, their faces blank beneath their masks, and watched the squirrels play.

  My mother did not speak, but sat smiling on all of the academicians as they addressed their remarks to her.

  “This is most pleasant, is it not, Mademoiselle?”

  “Like unto the first age of man, before we fell.”

  She smiled, and her arm was by 03-01’s side, as he was holding her wrist, making note of her pulse.

  Dr. 09-01, who had rid in the carriage with us, explained, “In the original state of man, we were happy — when we were animals. But when we rose from four feet to two, we became precarious. Now we hold ourselves away from Nature. Bipedal, we teeter always on the brink of collapse, and worry about balance. Gentlemen, it is a great pity that, knowing of our previous felicity and our current distresses, we do not return to our four-footed posture and feel the soil again beneath our hands. ’Tis a damned shame that we do not choose to revert to the blissful state of mammalian repose.”

  There were general cries of yea and indeed. 07-03 heaved himself up on all fours. He came to my side, and said, “You are so silent and solemn. Perhaps you too would like to crawl? As our ancestors did? What say to a race in the Blissful State of Mammalian Repose? First one to the cow?”

  I looked at 03-01, who nodded indulgently, and at my mother, whose face did not change, and I got on all fours and raced with the others, waddling, our fundaments pointed at the heavens.

  As we rushed the cow, that ponderous beast — uneasy still in spite of its four-legged stance — fled; and we gave up our race for aimless crawling and darting.

  The academicians watched my mother as they played with me, to see how she took their games, their dandling of her beloved son, their demonstration of amiable paternity; and her smile warmed us all.

  So we spent that day in the cheery grove, with the vivid light of later afternoon falling on the grasses; we spent it bumbling about in the Blissful State of Mammalian Repose.

  I may have laughed.

  My mother did, certainly, to see those philosophers grubbing as they did before her in the dirt. 03-01 clapped, and smoked his pipe. The three wives of academicians went for a walk up the lane, haughty and masked, unimpressed by the spectacle.

  Evening fell, as it falls always on the entertainments of man, foretelling the solemnity of night and end.

  I recall this day for the sake of Mr. Gitney, at that time called 03-01, as an homage to his desires for a world that cannot be.

  He spake that evening of America, saying: “My friends — this is a continent that beckons with its mighty crags, its thunderous rivers, its gloomy forests, so filled with unknown life. Yes? God has spread here a mighty canvas, stretched and ready for the artist’s hand. Everywhere there is bounty, demanding to be plucked from the tree; and trees, that, in their ancient beauty, beg to be felled and made into ships and houses on the illimitable hills of this land, offered so freely to civilized man. I believe fully, gentlemen, that the Golden Age shall come again in this new Eden.”

  In the gloaming, we rode back into Boston. I asked to sit up atop the carriage with 24-06, the valet. Though in the normal course of events such a request would have been refused due to the pernicious n
ight airs, 03-01 was feeling indulgent after our idyll, and gave me license to sit there and watch the moon come out above the steeples of the city.

  24-06 was but ten years older than me, and but a few years younger than my mother.

  “24-06,” I said, “why does the moon show its face sometimes before the sun is gone?”

  “My name is not 24-06,” he said.

  I hazarded, “05?”

  “I am called Bono,” he said, “and I will change that name, too, before I die.”

  “Bono,” I said, “why does the moon show its face sometimes —”

  “Keep silent, Prince,” he said, “or I shall kick you right off the carriage with my boot. You will lie in the bulrushes, weeping, and no one will come for you.”

  I did not move.

  He said, “Do not weep. You must become accustomed to not weeping.” With that, he reached to my upper arm, took ahold of the flesh, and pinched without cease.

  At this, I became Observant. I ceased to move, but watched the world being gathered into night. I did not want to twitch, and compel 24-06 to further fury.

  The carriage made its way through the city gates, where the felons hung on their nooses, the crows upon the scaffold, and we rolled past the Common.

  He let go.

  We came to the gates of 03-01’s house. We went into the stable-yard.

  The carriage came to a halt.

  24-06 whispered to me, “You must learn fear. I do this for your own sake. Fear is like happiness, but the smile is wider.”

  And with that, he threw himself down off the box, and assisted the coachman in preparing the steps for the ladies’ disembarkation.

  In such episodes as these, I began to ponder the mystery of who I was, and what that might mean.

  There was no field into which the men of the College of Lucidity did not make their inquiries. They watched the motions of the heavens and judged the composition of the earth. They corresponded with botanists throughout the Colonies, sending them bulbs and shoots when illustrations would not do. The banister of the rear staircase was hung with drying leaves and stalks sent from the frontier.

  These specimens were delivered by a fellow named Druggett, who traveled the western forests, trading and purchasing furs from the savages of the Iroquois Nations. He was a shrewd naturalist in his own right, and often brought back samples of flora or fauna for pay. He had seen many wonders in the forests, and was responsible for many of the passing freaks of my academicians: their scheme to domesticate the moose for transport and milk, their commitment to edible lichen.

  As Pliny the Naturalist saith, “No man is wise in every hour.”

  Druggett was a frightening man to me, his clothes always covered in burns and smears, his head wound in a bandage that, he claimed, fastened his brain. He had in his pocket a collection of broken clay pipes, being unwilling to purchase new ones, and he would stand in our parlor with his hands in his pockets, smoking and telling us tales of narrow escapes that even I, in my infancy, could tell were embroidered for our pleasure.

  When I was four, he and six other men brought a dragon’s skull which had been found far to the west. It was brown, and its teeth were terrible.

  I gazed at it in wonder (I am told), and fingered its nostrils.

  “Guaranteed before the flood,” said Druggett. “Guaranteed old. Ancienter than Noah’s lips and beard.”

  “In what situation was it discovered?” asked Mr. 03-01.

  Druggett answered, “By a soap-boiler. He was jumping off a cliff in despair.”

  “In what attitude was it found? What layer of the sediment?”

  “Aye.” Druggett nodded knowledgeably and closed one eye. “The sentiment was love. Had a young maiden he was fond of, or a particular baboon or some such, and it run off.”

  I hardly recall their words. I remember my first sight of the dragon, though, its vacant sockets and knuckled teeth, and the murmur of their conversation; and I have been told by my mother that when they looked down, after some minutes speaking of the skull, they found my body lain out behind it, and my head within the monster’s flat head, my arms against my sides, my chin on the floor, my eyes glaring out at 03-01 as if my tiny body belonged to the beast and I had always inhabited it.

  And though I never spoke except when bidden to speak, in this one instance I cried and sobbed until they allowed me to sleep in the room with the monster, my head in its long-rotted cranium, my body curled behind it as if it and I were some nightmare tadpole waiting to burst from the murk and reinstate its reign upon the genteel fields of Earth.

  When I was young, before I could tell numbers and operate a scales and so record the weight of my own excrement, the men of the house daily performed this calculation for me. They weighed what I ate when it went in, and daily took the measure of its transformation when it came out.

  When the need came upon me, I would bashfully refer the matter to them, and they would fetch the golden platter made for the purpose, and I would straddle it while one of them held it near my knees.

  Mr. 03-01, the master of the house, watching the process, would nod and declare some pronouncement: “Sallow in color . . . watery in consistency; altogether a dispirited, morose ejection” or “Solid and stippled with corn . . . brave and manly; a matter for some pride.” The other would take down his words in a column for that purpose.

  Across the room, my mother would be learning her lessons on the harpsichord. The music-master counted out measures while I endeavored to deliver what was asked of me.

  The gold of which the platter was made, I now descry, was necessary so that the metal should remain inert, and the composition of my fæces more firmly be established. As with so many elements of my upbringing, it took me some time to appreciate what thought had gone into the regulations by which I was raised, and the extreme purity and inviolability of their conception.

  When I was five and was taught subtraction, 03-01 showed me how to weigh the golden chamber-pot and subtract its weight to determine more easily how much I had passed in the day. By such lessons did I become acclimated to scientific calculation in even the meanest function, so learning the secrets of tare and gross. When, at about that time, I perceived that others did not have their leavings weighed so, it made a great impression upon me; and I had an even greater sense of my mysterious importance in this murky scheme, the unaccountable preciousness of everything I did to those who strove to watch over me.

  Of my origins, I know only the stories my mother told me; and she did not speak often of the past. When I was small, she would, when allowed to come to my bedside, tell me softly of her nation; but when I was seven or eight years of age, she spake no more of it, and if I asked, told me that I was fast becoming a man, and men have no need of mothers’ tales.

  My mother was a princess of the Egba people in the Empire of Oyo, in western Africa. She told me of the royal throne where she sate, crowned, while her father dispensed law to the people of that country: her throne a single orchid, grown vast through the influence of the tropical heat and rain. Enthralled by her description, I saw her issue forth from the palace in panoply, trumpets crying fanfares, she being drawn upon a chariot by the exertions of panthers, her serene features shaded by umbrellas of bright damask. There, in Oyo, she lived in blissful state with her brothers and sisters, the royal family; and there, in the palace of orchids, she fell in love with a prince from a neighboring state when he came to pay respects to her father.

  The marriage of princess and prince, both struck with love, would have proceeded unhindered — for my grandfather the King approved the match — had a prince of another kingdom not jealously desired my mother. He — a cocksure brute much given to womanizing and the lion-hunt — nursed a grievance in his heart, and would not let it go. He went in to the King, my grandfather, and demanded that my mother break off the engagement with her paramour. The King laughed him to scorn, and told him to leave the court immediately.

  Leave the court, the criminal brute d
id — and removed home to his warrior-kingdom, and rallied his army, and returned to assault the palace of orchids, which swiftly fell, knowing only the fruits of peace before this time.

  My mother was snatched from my father; they were parted amidst smoke and the weeping of women; and she was dragged away. My father was slain. The rival brought her before him, and demanded she offer her hand in marriage. She refused, and said she would sooner die than submit to his loathsome caresses. He kept her for some weeks, and then, seeing that she would not capitulate, sent her off to the coast in exile.

  She was conducted by her captors to the kingdom of Dahomey, and embarked from the quays of Whydah; thereafter being held for some months at the fortress of B—, off the coast, with no hope for communication with her grieving people. When I asked her what that castle was like, she told me that it smelled always of spices, and the salt of the wind. It was full of flowers always — flowers in the garden, in the windows, on the tables. She walked there in the round courtyard with the Governor’s wife, who used her with great kindness, knowing the nobility of her blood.

  Once, when she heard me play the violin, she said she reckoned that I was musical because I grew in the womb while she sate in the courtyard on the Isle of B—, listening to the Governor’s daughters play the harpsichord. He greatly missed the salons of Paris, and would ask them to play the music of Couperin, Rameau, and Royer in memory of his homeland. Weakly did the court tunes tinkle out above the crashing of surf on the basalt rocks at the castle’s foundations.