She hangs back in the dark of the little theater. The bright stage under the proscenium reminds her of something she saw once in a Stewart Granger movie, a bonfire blazing in the maw of a stone god. She seems to be seeing faces everywhere today. Maybe she ought to take her mother’s place here in this creepy joint. Above the proscenium, two more faces: masks representing the poles of mania. A woman in a gold-and-black-striped leotard looks out from the wings, her painted face as hectic as a ballerina’s. A fat man in a bathrobe plays glassy ostinatos on a Wurlitzer organ, shards of waltz from some half-familiar whole. Rocking back and forth on the bench, wildly out of tempo with his music. Later, she will learn that the fat man was really a fat woman.
There is something awful about this cave of make-believe with its smell of velvet and dust. It has the magic weirdness of the old amusement halls on Uncle Ray’s nine-ball circuit, the back rooms beyond the pool tables and pinball machines. The penny catacombs of entertainment. Live chickens in glass music boxes that dance when subjected to mild electrocution through the feet. Coin-operated beheadings of tiny queens, lynchings of tiny clockwork Negroes. A lifesize Little Egypt automaton enacting a creaky seizure of a hoochie-koochie dance. A clockwork Lucifer with a clockwork leer who makes predictions about your love life in racy slang rendered incomprehensible by time.
She stands unnerved by the bright mouth of the stage as if it is about to render prophecy.
*
“It’s all right,” the woman in the white cardigan says. “Do you see your mother, sweetheart?”
“No.”
Here and there among the seats she sees the outlined heads of other people in the audience, but none of them is right. She cannot imagine and will never discover the nature or identities of these other people. Doctors. Attendants. Napoleons and mothers of Christ. She hears the clunk of a switch. In the sudden total dark, a ghostly half-moon slews across her retinae.
The lights come up again on a field of clover. Trefoil hands, faces uplifted toward a shiny sun that hangs above their spiky pink and white heads. A swarm of fat-bottomed bees careen in and out among the flowers. Wordlessly, they quarrel with the flowers. They dip into the flowers’ faces with the bowls of big wooden spoons.
George Washington appears, dressed in knee britches, a powdered wig, a greatcoat, hatchet slung from his belt. He stomps around abusing the flowers and exhorting the bees to molest them for their nectar. This is not George Washington, it turns out, but a herdsman of bees. The purpose or significance of the hatchet, apparently not intended for the chopping down of a cherry tree, remains unclear. The bee herder watches contentedly as his bees fly back and forth with their ladles full of nectar from the looted flowers to their unseen hive. All of this is routine for the bee herder. He lounges on a hummock and fights to stay awake. The sun with its metallic glow goes down. Evening hoists a silvery moon into the heavens.
A pair of bears, unseen by the bee herder, shamble on from stage left. They swing their heads in unison from side to side as they advance. They are shabby-looking bears, a couple of ruffians with patchy coats. They observe the traffic in nectar. When the bee herder’s back is turned, they accost the plumpest of his bees. They threaten it with violence and confiscate its wooden spoon. With bearish ardor, they guzzle up every drop. At last the cries of the assaulted bee attract the attention of the drowsing bee herder. He leaps to his feet and throws his silver hatchet at the bears. But instead of striking them, it just keeps rising, all the way to the Moon overhead, where it lodges with a soft thump like a dictionary falling onto a pillow.
The bee herder studies the problem. He fidgets with his wig. Then he remembers his rope. He makes a lariat, swings it over his head with an audible whirr, and then launches the loop toward the hatchet with its handle protruding from the Moon. The loop misses the handle and the rope falls back to earth. He windmills it and launches it moonward again. This time the eye of the rope snags the wooden handle. He gives it a tug and then starts to pull himself up the rope hand over hand. Bees, bears, and flowers raise their heads and gawp in amazement. The bee herder climbs unamazed.
Darkness falls over the field of clover, dawn breaks on the Moon. Jagged moon mountains glow cool and silvery blue in the background as the bee herder, hatchet restored, strolls along unfazed by his new surroundings. He passes silver moon trees like the skeletons of cacti. He picks a bouquet of silver moonflowers. As he turns, he notices a small silver ball rolling toward his feet. A woman comes running in after it but stops when she sees him. She wears a silver gown and a silver crown. A large pair of silver wings rise up behind her, a moth’s wings, billowing gently in a lunar breeze. He picks up the ball, and for a moment they regard each other. Then he tosses her the ball, and she catches it.
What befalls the bee herder and the Queen of the Moon after this first encounter—how the pantomime is meant to end—will remain forever unknown by my mother.*
*
The mountains of the Moon glowing under the light of a blue gel at the back of the stage were tinfoil balls, massed and squashed into cake-frosting peaks. The moon trees were a couple of branching coat racks wrapped in more foil—“silver paper,” my grandmother always called it. The moonflowers were clusters of eggbeaters, whisks, and serving spoons planted in cake pans. It was all so ridiculous and sad. It was pathetic. And yet the foil shone in the subaqueous light. The coat racks raising their jubilant arms and the bouquets of kitchen implements had the incongruous dignity of homely things.
Looking into the radiant mouth of the stage, my mother felt a strong sense of recognition, as if she had visited this world in a dream. As if, when she was a child, the fog of her mother’s dreams had rolled through the house every night and left this sparkling residue on her memory. There was no way the baffling history of a spacefaring bee herder and his visit to the Moon had been dictated to her mother in some kind of bogus hand symbology by poor old lightning-addled Mr. Casamonaca. The Queen of the Moon entered, chasing the little ball of foil, in her tinfoil dress and crown, and her wobbling wings made from nylons stretched over coat hangers and glued with sequins. This was not the Moon at all. It was some other world—some other mother—uncharted and hitherto unknown.
It was just the most beautiful thing, my mother told me.
Then the bright glints seemed to startle from her the tinfoil crown and swarm the air between her mother and her, jigging and flittering, until they all flew away and left her in the dark.
*
She came to herself on the leather settee outside the theater door, sitting beside Mr. Casamonaca, her nose rife with the smell of mothballs oozing from his suit. Mrs. Outcault crouched in front of her, frowning as if watching a doubtful cake through the window of an oven. Behind Mrs. Outcault stood a bear, three clovers, two bees, and the fat pianist in his bathrobe and slippers. Behind them stretched an expanse of wall covered in the same wallpaper that was in the entry hall, which my grandfather had caught her staring at without understanding why. The thing was that if you looked at the wallpaper one way it was nothing special, a repeating pattern of carnation-pink escutcheons with white roundels, each shield supported by a pair of gold willow-leaf garlands. But if you looked at the wallpaper another way, you were confronted by a crowd of bloody-mouthed faces, ass-eared and staring.*