Doctor Sax - Jack Kerouac [42]
So one night, from the Phebe house, we walked Blanche (who later in such a walk insisted on bringing my dog Beauty because she’s afraid of the dark and as the little beast escorted her home it rushed out and got run over by Roger Carrufel of Pawtucketville who was somehow driving an Austin tinycar that night and the low bumper killed it, previously on Salem Street at Joe’s lawn door it got run over by an ordinary car but rolled with the wheels and never got hurt–I heard the news of its death at precisely that moment in my life when I was lying in bed finding out that my tool had sensations in the tip–they yelled it up to me thru the transom, “Ton chien est mort! (Your dog is dead!)” and they brought it home dying–on the kitchen floor we and Blanche and Carrufel with hat in hand watch Beauty die, Beauty dies the night I discover sex, they wonder why I’m mad—)—So now Blanche (this is before Beauty was bom, 2 years earlier) wants me and Ma to walk her home, so we go, a beautiful soft summer night in Lowell. The stars are shining in the deep,—millions. We cross the great darknesses of Sarah Avenue by the park, with hugetree sighs above; and the baleful flickering dark of Riverside Street and the Textile ironpicket shrouds and on to Moody and across the Bridge. In the summer-dark, far below, the soft white horses of the thrush-foam over rocks are surging in a Nightly Tryst with Mystery and Mists that Crash off Rocks, in a Gray Anathema Void, all raw-roar-roo … a wild Ionian sight and frightening– we turn at Pawtucket and move up past the gray tenement and the Hospital St. Joseph’s where my sister had appendicitis and the Funeral homes of the dark Flale there after you pass the curve of gooky rickety Salem curvacue-ing in–huge mansions appear, solemn, sitting in state on lawns, all behung with signs- “R.K.G.W.S.T.N. Droux, Funeral Director”–with hearses, lacy windows, warm rich interiors, dank chauffeur like hearse garages, shrubs around the lawn, the great slopes of the river and the canal falling away from the black lawn to grand darkness and lights of foam and night–ha river! My mother and Blanche are discussing astrology as they walk under the stars. Sometimes they lapse into philosophy—”Isn’t it a perfectly beautiful night Angy? Oh my fate!—” sighing–Blanche had tried to commit suicide from the Moody Bridge–she had told us among gloomy pianos–she played piano and told her moods, she was an elegant visitor to our house that sometimes my father found infuriating especially because she was teaching us so well–explaining Rachmaninoff’s Rustle of Spring and playing it–a beautiful blonde woman, well preserved–old Shammy had his eye on her, he lived in that old white house on Riverside across Textile iron-pickets under an immense 1776 tree and we always talked about Shammy as we passed at night the house where he lived with his wife (Sad Harmonies of Love Night Lowell)—
The Grotto–it Hugely Mooked ahead of us, to the right … that baleful night. It belonged to the orphanage on the corner of Pawtucket Street and School Street at the head of the White Bridge–a big Grotto is their backyard, mad, vast, rehgious, the Twelve Stations of the Cross, little individual twelve altars set in, you go in front, kneel, everything but incense in the air (the roar of the river, mysteries of nature, fireflies in the night flickering to the waxy stare of statues, I knew Doctor Sax was there flowing in the back darks with his wild and hincty cape)—culminating, was the gigantic pyramid of steps