A Goblet of Poison
Introduction
Once upon a time, in my time, I was a child in the country, with The Olive Fairy Book by Andrew Lang in my lap in a window seat. I’m sure it was raining—otherwise I would have been outside.
In illustrations by H.J. Ford, long maidens with tiny heads and ever-streaming roan hair stand on the floor of the sea in gauzy dresses cinched with jeweled girdles. Sometimes they ride the night skies on wobbly carpets in air filled with released genies and djinns. Princes who look just like them gaze up from the base of a tower where a snake waits to make the primal three. Or at least I remember it so…
Another window seat looks onto Central Park at tree level out over playgrounds and green lakes and statues I climb—Hans Christian Andersen with a bronze duckling at his feet, Alice in Wonderland with the manic Mad Hatter and enchanted mushrooms. Up a hill is the Mother Goose Playground with Mother herself riding a stone goose.
As any child, I feel myself observed, bewitched, misplaced in the universe; occasionally, it is as if someone has put a curse on me. I am taken out to play in these forests of the park. My courage is tested at school where lessons wait to be learned, like in a fairy tale.
I live in a palace in the city with many rooms and doormen and elevator men as my guards. In the basement the laundress fills huge vats with wet white sheets and brings them up in soft square folds in baskets. In the kitchen, the cook guards the stove, humming spirituals as her cauldrons boil and soufflés rise. In the bedroom with silk walls, the king and queen live happily and quietly except for dinner parties when the house is alive with the party help. The three children never have an evil stepmother and cash and precious stones magically appear on the mother’s dresser. Here, wishes are granted, vessels refill, animals rescue, and a fairy grandmother appears with an armload of dresses. Those who set out on a quest, after thwarting perils, are rewarded though happily ever after has an end.
Sometimes, now, as I walk on familiar New York streets, I feel, along with Andrei Codrescu describing New Orleans, “There are more dead than living people here, and the dead are not all that dead.”
Though I have borrowed from those I know and knew, no one in any of these stories lives except in the zipcode of fiction.
This is my New York, my own goblet of sweet sweet poison.