The Princess Tower

"But you and I must part."

This photo-essay describes the journey that Caleb Karcist and Lillian Cloud take through the "Mount Olive Cemetery" in Gloucestertide, ending in their visit to the granite tower there. The helix is a recurring image of romantic love in Bayliss's fiction. When Belle Cingani first meets Caleb, she builds a spiral staircase out of his wooden triangles. Gloria Keith describes her infatuation thus: "Love's remedy was but an intoxication; the first beatitude a foundation for further ascent of a winding tower." So this is the story of an Orphean trip through the land of the dead, a brief human episode amid the cold stone. Denying the inevitable, all lovers are desperate to keep entropy at bay.

The double gates of Mount Olive Cemetery, spanned by Egyptian entablature, two or three miles from the brickwalled Garth of seven-gated Norumbega, were worthy of life's ultimate frontier-crossing - in contrast to the red sandstone chapel and administrative building just inside them. Like many of the markers death-bunkers and monuments they opened upon, their frame had been hewn and assembled from the gray bones of Lady Gloucester.

The gate of Mount Auburn Cemetery was designed by Dr. Jacob Bigelow and built out of Quincy granite.

He descended the unfolding step of the trolleycar before daring to glance to his left across the broad thoroughfare at the noble gates of the dead's own city where in his fantasy of astonishment she might have been awaiting him already. So first, before the vehicles pausing for a red light slowly lifted their blockade of the opposite bank, he found himself on a sidewalk facing the shop and display yard of the venerably entrenched headstone merchants - Mount Olive Memorials - who had immemorially displayed popular samples engraved with flowery and angelic lines (for it also served more banal cemeteries), nowadays wrought only in two dimensions upon blank stock of highly polished wholesale granite from Montvert. To the right was a florist's shop; on the left, beyond a broad residential side street divided by abandoned car tracks, a svelte low supermarketing concatenation packed with kilroys, which he found to his surprise had replaced the shabby scattering of stores he dimly remembered on the site of an almost prehistoric carbarn. It was like being landed with a fever and a sore throat on the wrong shore of the Amazon.

The gravestone merchant is still there, on Mount Auburn near Aberdeen Avenue. The electric trolleys servicing bus routes #71 and #73 from Harvard still pass the cemetery gates.

...busts and statues, even of a dog (symbolizing the reliability of the USA's first express company, founded by the deceased), and of the Sphinx (symbolizing the endurance of the federal Union), and wholesome neoclassical gazebos, or cordons of cast iron enclosing daissed cenotaphs. There were also a few bizarre experiments, such as a stack of three jagged sandstone rocks (or a sculptured imitation thereof), ostensibly balanced upon each other like some cunning feat of Heracles. ...the founder of the Docetic Church of Christian Health with a telephone in her coffin.

This three-stone sculpture is the Lewis Jones tomb, and the Sphinx (see the image on the Gloucestertide page) is the Civil War monument. The founder of the Docetic Church of Christian Health is obviously Mary Baker Eddy, about whom a popular but mistaken urban legend persists that her Mount Auburn mausoleum contains a telephone.

What had most attracted Caleb and his playmates, however, and therefore now urged him to revisit the mazy routes of awe, with or without Lilian, was a hilltop keep that matched the gateposts in species of stone but outweighed and overshadowed them as a mass of very different style and situation: the pseudo-European "Princess Tower" (as his mother dubbed it). Though invisible through acres of crowning foliation from the entrance of the cemetery, it surveyed not only the grounds of Mount Olive itself but also the Shawmut River basin of Greater Botolph. It was the high place upon which in Sunday School he had imagine Satan to have tempted Jesus. George Washington, had he been summoned a century later than 1775, could have used its round platform to command his siege. It rendered the enclave of Norumbega University in a perspective appropriately obfuscated by daubs of greenery and but for its tallest halls and belfries reduced to proper proportions in the vastly spreading plain of the city that surrounded it, much as if the Unaford to which the stonemason Jude aspired were viewed from a balloon and almost lost to sight within an industrial toy-town.

Laughing, little conscious of their course, they wound generally upward, capriciously seeking the tower up steeps and around curves. It rose like a magic vision upon the highest contour of the Romantic interior, but was all the harder to fix upon as they nearly circled its partly wooded mount, sometimes shortcutting proper roads and paths, especially as the all-too-human leader was nearly oblivious to every landmark except his numinous follower.

This is Washington Tower, but Bayliss renames it Emerson Tower in honor of the Massachusetts poet and philosopher. 'The stonemason Jude' refers to Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy, who created his own fictional locale of Wessex.

At last from under the greenery he led her up the final breathless steps of an embankment to the pavilioned base of the tower. The naked citadel, storybook imitation of a Norman donjon without castle or bailey, had been erected by the same eleemosynary president of the Mount Olive corporation (a Norumbega professor of medicine and amateur architect) who had designed the Egyptian main gate as a monument to transcendent eternity and commissioned much of the cemetery's triumphant sculpture. To Lilian it seemed the unbraced centerpost of an infinitely high blue circus - with not a cloud to catch her fall. Unwarned by pilaster or jamstone in the smooth surface of the wall they traced, she shied like a rabbit at the suddenly gaping recess of the portal, which pierced the titanic blocks of dressed granite like a browless cyclops. And within the low dark aperture a concentrically curved iron door was retracted on its swivel like the nictitating membrane of a one-eyed reptile to disclose in deep shadow the first stone steps of a sinister helix.

By 'sinister' Bayliss means 'foreboding': the tower is actually a right-handed helix.

Only after what seemed like many giddy revolutions were they delivered out of breath upon the landing of the lower balcony, where she began to recover her inward trust in his providence. In the open air, grasping the stout iron railings that spanned the crenels of the parapet, the altitude was nothing to a native of the western mountains. It was the opacity of hewn cold stone, which tombs were also made of, that had frightened her. Inside again, the stone lightened and dried as they wound a final spiral against gravity to the unshaded hemisphere of the sky, to which they were instinctively drawn, like heliotropic moths in an inverted funnel; for the passage narrowed as it rose, constraining their elbows and at the top making them duck for the companionway scuttle. But at last they came to a breathtaking standstill in the balmy ether directly under the very sun whose source some of her people had sought in eastward migration (before Europeans were seeking Occidental gold), only to learn the necessity of fishing in the bitter waters that put a stop to their hubris. The dazzled lovers issued from the ironclad cuddyhatch like storm-worn sailors awakened to an amazing change of latitude.

The view from the top of the tower, looking south toward Boston. Unfortunately, the lovers can rise no higher than the tower's peak. Lillian insists their affair come to an end. Like lovelorn Orpheus, Caleb leaves his hope in the land of the dead.