Moon Shadow: The Totally True Love Adventure Series (Volume 1) (6 page)

The article ends by saying that last January Frank’s wife, Mary Rosen, died accidentally from a lethal combination of prescription medications and alcohol.

Wow, that’s a lot to digest, I tell myself. I wonder if my mother is familiar with Frank’s life story.

After Manny goes reluctantly back into his cage, I pick up my diary and walk downstairs to the living room. I’m starting to feel like I need to write something.

But first I pick up the remote and turn on the TV, flipping a few stations until I come upon the National Geographic channel. They’re showing a program about African animals, like zebras, their migratory patterns, like when they go across rivers full of huge crocodiles and everything.

I watch the National Geographic program for a while, but I can’t stop thinking about my dad. I miss him so much. Suddenly I feel the need to write my dad a letter, in my diary. I haven’t written him for some time. I turn off the TV and begin to write feverishly.

“Dear Dad, I hope you won’t be upset when I tell you that Mom has met a man, a congressman, and I met him, too. His name is Frank Rosen. Mom told me not to mention Frank’s last name to anyone or tell anyone he’s a congressman because we don’t want nosy news reporters coming around and bothering us.

“I googled Frank Rosen on the computer and read all about him. His wife accidentally killed herself in January. Frank seems sort of nice. Not as nice as you, of course. You’re always our number one. I don’t know if Frank makes Mom happy, but I think he does. We’re going to dinner with him next Thursday and we’ll meet his two sons, one of whom is seventeen. I’m feeling excited about the dinner.

“I’m also excited about a decision I’ve made. Things are going to be different with me from now on. I’m going to become more adventurous. For starters, I’m going to start dressing a little less conservatively. Don’t worry, Dad, nothing extreme. Instead of knee length skirts, I’ll try wearing skirts that are cut above the knee, for example. I don’t mean miniskirts or anything like that. There’s nothing wrong with allowing the physical beauty God has bestowed upon me to show. I’ve also decided that I’m not going to worry about the moon thing, and you shouldn’t either. By the way, Frank Rosen is on the congressional committee that will recommend to the president what we should do to keep the moon problem from becoming even more serious than global warming. There’s going to be a special session of the United Nations General Assembly soon, too.

“Mom is with Isadora right now, at the Epstein auction. Guess what? There’s only one more week of summer school. I’m doing well, but I’m tired of homework. I lost my best friend, Ashley, this week. Do you remember her? She lives across the street and three houses down. Anyway, everyone at school, including Ashley, thought Mom was just fooling around with Frank, when in fact it’s a really serious relationship. I don’t know if they’re going to get married, but I wouldn’t be surprised. Would you? I think it would be a good thing for Mom and I right about now. I know you’ll understand.

“I’m expecting a good response to the petsitter notices I’ve put up in the neighborhood because most of the people on our street keep animals. I feel the experience will be beneficial since I intend to major in zoology at college, and I need some spending money for the summer. Mom told me about the money from the estate of Grandma Hartford. She will receive twelve million dollars soon and I’ll have a four million dollar trust fund to draw from in small increments when I turn eighteen, but that doesn’t change the way I think. I’ll never go around acting as if we’re, like, heiresses or anything.

“On the contrary I’ve always believed people are rich if they are able to meet the requirements of their imaginations, if they are able to do what they find interesting, like you told me. I see the world as inviting, and I can’t wait to throw myself into it and begin to build my own life, and help to build a better world.

“Manny is doing fine, still hates his cage and all. I let him out as much as possible. I miss you, Dad. Love, Sarah.”

And then I pretend, as always, like I’m addressing an envelope for my letter: “Mr. William Hartford, On the Road to Heaven, #1, Kingdom of God.”

B
eing back at home I suddenly feel about fourteen. For a long time I lie in my old bed seeking a dream that will draw me off to sleep again, return me to the Garden of Eden, that Neverland of essential nature, of teshuvah, where I might choose never to grow up, never to suffer the consequences of tasting the fruits of knowledge.

The truth is that my old room still retains something of its air of impairment. After three days in my motel room, lamenting, regretfully, my mother’s death and then beginning to feel on the cusp of a way forward, again I feel exhausted, befuddled. My insides hurt, my bones, my desiccated heart. Finally, I drift off, falling into a deep sleep, and another dream arises.

“Danny, Danny.”

She’s mine.

I can feel the undersea-soft texture of her skin, the smooth white-hot flesh of my virgin goddess, holy mother of sin’s paradise, pressing gently against my boyish brown body.

I lie beside her on a rich purple tapestry in my bedroom, next to the tarnished frame of my under-sized bed.

Bright sparkling rays of first light shine upon us, filling the room with natural splendor. It seems the crystal sunlight has washed from the Valley all the dark echoes of late night noises and the tragic aura of an early morning fog.

It is good, I think, embracing my goddess in the fantastic light of day. There is no darkness, only the silvery sunrise, and as I hold her fast, kissing her tenderly, tasting the sublime sweetness of her blood and milk offering, I know I will never let go.

I’ve found my new religion. I will be eternally nourished and protected. I am at one with the delicate being of my white goddess, basking in her warmth, rocking peacefully to the rhythm of her lunar-tidal motion.

She passes her velvety fingers over my body, stroking me tenderly, caressing the bare erect center of my burgeoning wholeness, cradling me as though I were an infant—helpless.

Suddenly there comes an unnerving sound, succinct like the crack of a leather belt, only louder, like an exploding cherry bomb or a gunshot: POP!

I start violently. My God-fearing Jewish-Catholic scrotum shrinks. I look up in alarm and see the bathroom door fly open with a clatter, doorknob crashing against windowsill, the large door damming the flow of light and sending my tiny room into shadowy darkness.

In the bathroom doorway, wearing a filthy trench coat, stands a toothless monstrosity with matted gray hair and bloodshot eyes in a face full of hideous ridges of pink flesh. Its lips are red and swollen, ears long and pointed. Hairs sprout from the palms of its hands. I smell its rank breath.

In one outstretched hand, held high as in a Nazi salute, the monster is holding something. I can’t make it out at first, and then I see a red book. With wicked eyes set beneath thick brows, the creature glares at my white goddess and hurls the book at her. The book bursts into flames.

My goddess screams. “Help me!” she cries.

I break into a cold sweat, my stomach sickened. Vomit rises in my throat as my heart pulses wildly. I fear my goddess will be consumed with the fiery pages of the red book, but I can do nothing to help her. A raging tightness seizes my chest and my muscles turn stiff and unyielding. Panting, I struggle to catch my breath ...

I awaken to the noise of someone inside the house. I open my eyes and sit up quickly.

Or have I been dreaming?

Cool beads of sweat emerge on my forehead, settling like drops of Jello, suspended. I’m out of breath, expelling puffs of air as I draw deeply and rapidly.

I’d heard a voice, perhaps, a girl’s cry for help, remote, enigmatic. The sound must have come, I decide, from my dream, the second of two dark dreams this morning. I remember the first, in which my mother’s coffin had suddenly opened as it was being lowered into the earth, and I beheld my mother’s twisted face, turning toward me and gazing at me through eyes filled with indescribable terror.

Typically, before awakening, at that death-like moment of forgetting, my dreams dissolve into particles of nothingness. For some months I’ve been unable to find the mental key that will bring the images of one seemingly recurring nightmare into consciousness.

I lie back and listen to Albinoni’s “Adagio in G Minor,” playing softly on my stereo.

Over my bedroom’s only window, the curtains blow in the breeze, and the light dances on the walls. I reckon that it’s late morning or early afternoon. I couldn’t care less about time, which seems to pass all too slowly.

I know my father has left the house, gone to work. My brother Mike has taken Julie, his wife, to buy a dress for her birthday party, to be held on Thursday evening. I’m alone in my father’s house, which sits well out of view and earshot from other homes scattered along the base of Rattlesnake Mountain. The Gables is situated on two acres dotted with orange, lemon and grapefruit trees on the south side. Wild grapevines grow on the north side. A large pepper tree oversees the backyard, on the east side, and beyond that stands the majestic mountain, elevation one thousand feet.

I’ve asked myself why I came back to this house, although I know the answer well. It’s my nature to search unendingly for truth, and I am wondering, with stabs of anguish, if my mother took her own life because of me. I had let her down by leaving Liz’s unbridled letters where she could find them. Since then, nothing was ever the same between my mother and I, or between the Rosen and Santini families. The ineffaceable guilt of my error has pursued me like a demon.

Everywhere in my old room vistas of adolescent experiences, imaginary and real, open before my eyes. It’s strange, I think, how a person can lose his innocence all at once, without knowing, until it’s too late, that he’s passed into another existence.

In the wee hours of a moonlit morning, I recall, I would wake in the shadowy darkness of my bedroom and lean out of bed quietly to look for the ethereal bar of light in the thin space beneath my parents’ closed bedroom door. If the light shone, penetrating the darkness to join our worlds, my heart would race fiercely, and with the covers pulled up I would lie ever so still, not making a sound—I was good at that. I would listen carefully, tensed and alert, my eyes open into the pillow.

Sometimes I would hear nothing. At other times I would hear my mother’s moans, not at all suggestive of pleasure, but more like the muffled distress of a child. Then, heavy breathing, my father’s, gasps of developing passion, and the steady, rhythmic thumping of their king-sized bed.

More often than not I would hear my mother pleading quietly, whispering, “Frank, no, not tonight. You’re hurting me. Stop, Frank, please ... stop ... it hurts ...”

“Shut up, bitch, you’ll wake Dan,” my father would hiss threateningly. The congressman, used to having his way, has always believed in the principle of might is right. I would hear my mother’s soft cries of unclothed pain, her broken sobs, as my father took his hatred of life out on her.

I didn’t know whether I should keep very still, or rush into their room before it was too late. And then what? As it turned out, I was always frozen stiff with fear, so I would just listen from my bed in a knot of reveled emotion. At times I felt like crying, but I would quickly grit my teeth and sink beneath the covers, eyes open. I dreaded, more than anything, the horrible consequence (the nature of which was actually unclear, beyond exposing my shame) of being found awake by my father.

Occasionally I was visited by burning erotic desires, and because it seemed I had no choice, I would take myself in hand. Disconcertingly, I would wrest from my mind the horrid perceptions I had formed of my mother being raped. Instead I focused on visions of Julie, which roused my carnal-mindedness to no end. Blond and blue-eyed with a Miss World figure and soft sexy voice, Julie even now elicits images of Marilyn Monroe playing Sugar in Billy Wilder’s
Some Like It Hot
. Those sexual fantasies would send me into the fresh heaven of sin, and with the tension effectively released I might drift back into the safety of sleep, and if lucky, a dream would occur.

However, before I closed my eyes I would make a wish. I would ask God, from whom everything comes, including the death-camp murder of my paternal great grandparents by Adolph Hitler’s Nazis, to remove from the nostrils of humanity the stench of my father’s vile flesh. I would recast the grim incantation until I became drowsy. Then my heart would cry out with its silent promise to my mother: “I’ll find a way to stop him, Mom, and then I’ll make him pay!”

Often I had lain awake with eyes bulging until the sunlight entered my room like a trustworthy guard. Only then was I able to sleep. When I awakened later I would feel weak, as if I were recovering from a long illness.

In those days, each night before bed, I would pretend I was another boy, a boy soothed by the sounds of his mother and father communing privately, a boy who would fall asleep contentedly night after night, lulled to security by those sounds as by the murmur of a friendly mountain stream.