It was a mellow September afternoon. As Mason drove toward the entrance of the estate he saw an archway. At its curved top — at first — the words were not clear. Moments later they were. Four-thirty slanted sunlight accented them: Villa Princess Aliki. Across these somebody'd driven a brush stroke of black paint. Using the same brush, the person'd painted — on the wooden board — this: Home of The Brave Willow Plantation. Owners: Bobby Joe and Miss Lindy Belle Sommerfield. Zizi, Christos and Helena broke into star-spangled laughter at the sight. Mason was bewildered. “Straight ahead,” they directed. He followed the curving driveway till he came to the house. “What was that all about?” He was serious. “You'll see.” The other two cars were already parked in front of the grand pillared stairway to the enormous doors, which were opened. Mason, as they got out, noticed a man in the yard covering long tables with white table cloths. Inside the foyer Mason got the impression he was in a fifty-room mansion. A man who was obviously a servant came up the hallway from the back. Zizi told Mason he was Plato. “Hell show you your room.” Plato led Mason up a winding staircase and along a corridor past a series of closed doors. As Plato was opening the room he wanted Mason to occupy, David Pangrati popped up from around a corner. “Hello. I see you found your way. Good, good. Just make yourself at home.” He went in with Plato and Mason. “What size are you?” “Size?” “Never mind,” said Pangrati, “I can tell. Hagnon will bring your dinner clothes up. Once a week we do a different period. It's really sort of ironic that you're our guest on a night when we've planned to do pre-Civil War Mississippi.” “What?” “Oh, it's fun! You'll love it! Wait till you see yourself! I got the idea last year when I was in the states. Had a show at the University of Mississippi.” Mariella and Pavlos came in. In Greek they discussed Mason's probable sizes in shirt, jacket and trousers. Then they all left except Pangrati who took a tiny, live spotted bull snake from his pocket. “It's only seven,” he said. “What?” The time he meant. “Oh. What's that?” “It's my uta. It looks like a chicken flying upside-down in a Chagall but it's really not. I use it as a model for my fresco. You won't find him in the Blue Guide.” His chuckle was snagged on the blue fence of a cemetery gate. Mason cheered up: “If I had a lyre, I'd charm your damned pet!” Pangrati's laughter beat its wings against the wallpaper which was a birthday party scene of floating lovers kissing repeatedly eight thousand times against a background of hand painted blue silk dresses, glazed stoneware, in a living room where sky and earth met in the name of Oceanus. Green violinists provided soft music seeping along the baseboards. Mason dimly realized Pangrati still was talking: “… Need anything just… Hagnon… gardener… His wife, Medea… ” Mason felt suddenly very ill. His stomach was a cosmos of burned pine and rubber. “… Ciao!”
Night. In the sitting room they were delighted when Mason appeared. He looked great in his tux! He'd brought down with him an armful of things he forgot he had: gifts from Painted Turtle: a few porcupine quills, a beaded necklace, a rawhide vest, a sacred headdress, some smoked meat. Having found these items in his suitcase, he now presented them to his hosts. “Just a little token of my appreciation of your hospitality!” They all ooed and laughed nervously. His stomach ache was now joined by a killer-headache. As they fussed over the gifts, he dropped onto the couch like a sack of frostbitten sweet potatoes! “Quick!” somebody shouted, “he's ill!” When he came back to consciousness — an hour later? — it was time for the outdoor events. On the way out, through his fog he heard, “What shall we call you?” “Just call me Mister Nobody!” Odysseus? They laughed. He laughed and slapped their backs with the gentleness of pink and green in the Equestrienne of 1931. Rock-cut benches lined the yard. Mason clicked his champagne glass against other precious glass. Many of the women — some he hadn't seen before — wore long white or yellow off-the-shoulder hooped evening gowns. Little children hid under some of them. Dogs under others. Perhaps snakes? doctors? A couple held above their heads an unneeded parasol. A horse-drawn carriage waited in the driveway. Necklaces and bracelets and rings glittered all over the place. The night smelled of snake-skin and mossy wood, of vaporous flowers and Nijinsky's socks, of white lilac! Mason heard banjo music. A small group of musicians under a tree were doing their best to carve tones of hillbilly refinement. A couple of piglets turned on spits over a bricked-in fire under moonlight. Dining tables were arranged in rows. Mason sipped his champagne in the hope that it would turn him into a prancing antelope. He had plans for this night: for him it was like being a personified ship entering a narrow passage formed by two blissful, nameless islands covered with white ash and volcanic lava. His expectations were high! Some of the guests were beginning to dance under the lights: patriarchs and ladies! Pavlos like some figure rising naked from the sea, cutting a jig on the rough black grass! Where'd all the kids come from? Brats all over the place — boxing, pissing, giggling, rolling in the music. Pavlos stopped and came to Mason. “Won't you dance?” “With you? Why not?” And as their heels dug new scars into the faces of gods and demons long in the dust, Pavlos told him how last month they'd done eighteenth-century Russia. Helena then interrupted, “Now, now, tut tut: two men dancing together! You come to me, Mister Bobby Joe Sommerfield! I'm yo little ol sweety pie, Miss Lindy Belle.” Her accent was so funny Mason fell to the ground in uncontrollable laughter. But his perplexity was still safely at arm's length: veni vidi vici! vogue la galere! tout comprendre c'est tout pardonner! truditur dies die! The pungent smell of pig whirled as Mason later danced with Helena, then some other woman. Mister Nobody stomped the grass till half the lights burned out. Sunlight was winking through the branches of evergreen when he realized he was already asleep though still moving. But how'd he get moccasins on his feet? He'd surely started out with black dress shoes!
… Where? This stuff on his face. The woman next to him? Black smudges on her cheeks. He rested his head and reconstructed. Yes. Something — not long ago — had hit him like a brick between the eyes: he'd awakened and saw a woman in bed next to him. On each shoulder blade there was about a thirteen inch oblong scar: as though powerful wings had long ago been severed from her. He refused to connect this to anything. She was still asleep: that breathing was unfakable. Elias had fallen in the duck pond. Laughter. Except by then he was Jed the Red Neck. Mariella turned out to be Rebecca of Jacksonville who was a virgin at thirty. Helena, as Miss Lindy Belle, got pretty vulgar after midnight: she danced nude in moonlight. Pangrati, insisting his name was Big Papa, eventually did a jig. He also played “Skip to My Lou” on his harmonica. The musicians grew weary and after grinding their way through “So Long It's Been Good to Know You,” six times, they gave up and went off. He'd fallen asleep with a jingle swinging in his nerves: “Railroad, steamboat,/ River and canoe;/ Lost my true love,/ What shall I do.” And the dream: a snatch of it: strange how one was sort of native yet not exactly in the vernacular. Verna, ho! Had somebody played a washboard. Was it Hagnon, I mean, Sonny Boy. Surely a hooped skirt lost its cloth and the huge puffy bloomers beneath the wire-ribs seemed to blossom like a giant night flower. Who was Baby Jane. Pretty face — but she'd come later. Real name he never caught. No matter. Susy Mae. Mary Alice. Bo. Big Boy. All masks for Achilles. Phoibos. Zeus. Meidias. Lysias. Dionysos. Despite the unrealness he had to admit they had real imagination. And he as Blackface Hermes (as Zizi called him at the end of dinner with a toast) was up and all along cheered. One woman very much out of place (who he later learned was Vietnamese) came to the fancy dress party wearing a serious oriental mask: it was antelope skin meant to look like human. Her black hair hung to her spine. She was terrifying: the tiny eyes peeked through the slits like rat eyes: desperate and on the run. Wasn't it Pavlos who'd said her real face was completely destroyed by the explosion of a booby-trap. Or was she a figment in or beyond a recent dream. But the woman now beside him? Zizi. Moonlight and memory: no help now. One thing was clear though: he was not just drifting: the design was terrifying in its connections.