As a child I remember hearing that the old Hawley house was haunted long ago by the ghost of one of the puritan-pirate ancestors but, according to accounts, he was a decent ghost who walked and wandered and groaned as he should. The stairs creaked under his invisible weight and he rapped on the wall when a death was imminent, all proper and in good taste. The poltergeist was something quite different—malicious, malignant, and mischievous and vengeful. He never broke a valueless thing. Then he went away. I never really believed in him. He was a family joke, except that there he was and there were the broken pictures and shattered china.
When he left, Ellen began walking in her sleep as she was now. I could hear her slow but certain footsteps going downstairs. And at the same time my Mary sighed deeply and murmured beside me. And a breeze sprang up and moved the shadows of leafing limbs on the ceiling.
I slipped quietly from bed and slid into my bathrobe, for I, like everyone else, believed that a sleepwalker should not be startled awake.
This sounds as though I didn’t like my daughter, but I do. I love her, but I am somewhat in fear of her because I don’t understand her.
If you use our stairs near the edge on the side of the wall, they do not creak. I discovered that as a tomcatting boy coming home from the back fences of the town. I still use the knowledge if I do not want to disturb Mary. I used it now—moved silently down the staircase, trailing my fingers against the wall for guidance. A dim and lacy sublight penetrated from the street-lamp side and dissipated to semidarkness away from the window. But I could see Ellen. She seemed to have a glow, perhaps her white nightgown. Her face was shadowed but her arms and hands picked up light. She was standing at the glass-fronted cabinet where the worthless family treasures are kept, the carved scrimshaw, the sperm whales and boats complete with oars and irons and crews, harpooner in the bow—all carved from whales’ bone—like teeth and the curved tusks of walrus; a small model of the Belle-Adair, shiny with varnish, her furled sails and cordage brown and dusty. There were bits of the chinoiserie the old captains brought from the Orient after they had stripped the China area of sperm whales, bits and pieces, ebony and ivory, laughing and serious gods, Buddhas, serene and dirty, carved flowers in rose quartz and soapstone and some jade—yes, some good jade—and thin cups, translucent and lovely. Some of the things might be valuable—like the small shapeless horses which yet had life—but if they were valuable it was an accident, must have been. How would those sailing, whale-killing men know good from bad—or would they? Or did they?
The cabinet had always been the holy place of the parenti to me—Roman masks of the ancestors, or the lares and penates back to a stone fallen from the moon. We even had a mandrake root—a perfect little man, sprouted from the death-ejected sperm of a hanged man, and also we had a veritable mermaid, pretty ratty by now, but cleverly made by sewing the front end of a monkey and the after end of a fish together. It had shrunk with the years and the stitches showed, but its little teeth still showed in a ferocious smile.
I presume that every family has a magic thing, a continuity thing that inflames and comforts and inspires from generation to generation. Ours was a—how shall I say?—a kind of mound of translucent stone, perhaps quartz or jadeite or even soapstone. It was circular, four inches in diameter and an inch and a half at its rounded peak. And carved on its surface was an endless interweaving shape that seemed to move and yet went no place. It was living but had no head or tail, nor beginning or end. The polished stone was not slick to the touch but slightly tacky like flesh, and it was always warm to the touch. You could see into it and yet not through it. I guess some old seaman of my blood had brought it back from China. It was magic—good to see, to touch, to rub against your cheek or to caress with your fingers. This strange and magic mound lived in the glass cabinet. As child and boy and man I was allowed to touch it, to handle it, but never to carry it away. And its color and convolutions and texture changed as my needs changed. Once I supposed it was a breast, to me as a boy it became yoni, inflamed and aching. Perhaps later it evolved to brain or even enigma, the headless, endless, moving thing—the question which is whole within itself, needing no answer to destroy it, no beginning or end to limit it.
The glass case had a brass lock from colonial times and a square brass key, always in the lock.
My sleeping daughter had the magic mound in her hands, caressing it with her fingers, petting it as though it were alive. She pressed it against her unformed breast, placed it on her cheek below her ear, nuzzled it like a suckling puppy, and she hummed a low song like a moan of pleasure and of longing. There was destruction in her. I had been afraid at first that she might want to crash it to bits or hide it away, but now I saw that it was mother, lover, child, in her hands.
I wondered how I might awaken her without fright. But why are sleepwalkers awakened? Is it for fear that they may hurt themselves? I’ve never heard of injury in this state, except through awakening. Why should I interfere? This was no nightmare full of pain or fear but rather pleasure and association beyond waking understanding. What call had I to spoil it? I moved quietly back and sat down in my big chair to wait.
The dim room seemed swarming with particles of brilliant light moving and whirling like clouds of gnats. I guess they were not really there but only prickles of weariness swimming in the fluid of my eyes, but they were very convincing. And it did seem true that a glow came from my daughter Ellen, not only from the white of her gown but from her skin as well. I could see her face and I should not have been able to in the darkened room. It seemed to me that it was not a little girl’s face at all—nor was it old, but it was mature and complete and formed. Her lips closed firmly, which they did not normally do.
After a time Ellen put the talisman firmly and precisely back in its place and she closed the glass-fronted case and twisted the brass key that kept it closed. Then she turned and walked past my chair and up the stairs. Two things I may have imagined—one, that she did not walk like a child but like a fulfilled woman, and second, that as she went the luminescence drained away from her. These may be impressions, children of my mind, but a third thing is not. As she ascended the stairs, there was no creak of wood. She must have been walking near to the wall, where the treads do not complain.
In a few moments I followed her and found her in her bed, asleep and properly covered. She breathed through her mouth and her face was a sleeping child’s face.
On compulsion I went down the stairs again and opened the glass case. I took the mound in my hands. It was warm from Ellen’s body. As I had done in childhood, I traced the endless flowing form with my forefingertip and I took comfort in it. I felt close to Ellen because of it.