Poe's Children (56 page)

Dewey and Suze agreed and stepped out onto the green glass sea. The strange twisted surface crunched and crackled beneath their feet as if they were walking on braided ice. They walked in from the edge until all they could see was green: splattered at their feet, merging into solid color at the edges of their vision.

“I didn’t know war stuff could make anything pretty,” Suze said. “It looks like we’re on the planet Oz, doesn’t it?”

Dewey was as amazed by the question as by the landscape. Suze usually acted like she didn’t exist. “I guess so,” she nodded.

“This is probably what they made the Emerald City out of.” Suze reached down and picked up a long flat piece. “I am the Wicked Witch of the West. Bow down before my powerful magic.” She waved her green glass wand in the air, and a piece of it broke off, landing a few feet away. She giggled.

“I’m going to take some pieces of Oz home,” she said. She pulled the bottom of her seersucker blouse out to make a pouch and dropped in the rest of the piece she was holding.

Suze began to fill up her shirt. Dewey walked a few feet away with her head down, looking for one perfect piece to take back with her. The glassy surface was only about half an inch thick, and many of the pieces Dewey picked up were so brittle they crumbled and cracked apart in her hands. She picked up one odd, rounded lump and the thin glass casing on the outside shattered under her fingers like an eggshell, revealing a lump of plain dirt inside. She finally kept one flat piece bigger than her hand, spread out. Suze had her shirttails completely filled.

Dewey was looking carefully at a big piece with streaks of reddish brown when Dr. Gordon whistled. “Come on back. Now,” he called.

She looked at Suze, and the other girl smiled, just a little. They walked slowly back until they could see brown dirt ahead of them again. At the edge, Dewey turned back for a minute, trying to fold the image into her memory. Then she stepped back onto the bare, scorched dirt.

They walked back to the car in silence, holding their new, fragile treasure.

Dr. Gordon opened the trunk and pulled out a black box with a round lens like a camera. He squatted back on his heels. “Okay, now hand me each of the pieces you picked up, one by one,” he said.

Suze pulled a flat piece of pebbled glass out of her shirt pouch. When Dr. Gordon put it in front of the black box, a needle moved over a bit, and the box made a few clicking sounds. He put that piece down by his foot and reached for the next one. It was one of the round eggshell ones, and it made the needle go all the way over. The box clicked like a cicada.

He put it down by his other foot. “That one’s too hot to take home,” he said.

Suze pulled out her next piece. “This one’s not hot,” she said, laying her hand flat on top of it.

Her mother patted Suze’s head. “It’s not temperature, sweetie. It’s radiation. That’s a Geiger counter.”

“Oh. Okay.” Suze handed the piece to her father.

Dewey knew what a Geiger counter was. Most of the older kids on the Hill did. She wasn’t quite sure what it measured, but it was gadget stuff, so it was important.

“Did Papa help make this?” she asked, handing her piece over to Dr. Gordon.

Mrs. Gordon made a soft sound in her throat and put her arm around Dewey’s shoulders. “He certainly did. None of this would have been possible without brave men like Jimmy—, like your papa.”

Dewey leaned into Mrs. Gordon and nodded silently.

Dr. Gordon made Suze leave behind two eggshell pieces. He wrapped the rest in newspaper and put them into a shoebox, padded with some more newspaper crumpled up, then put out his hand for Dewey’s.

Dewey shook her head. “Can I just hold mine?” She didn’t want it to get mixed up with Suze’s. After a glance at his wife, Dr. Gordon shrugged and tied the shoebox shut with string and put it in the trunk. They took off their shoes and socks and brushed all the dust off before they got into the car.

“Thanks, Daddy,” Suze said. She kissed him on the cheek and climbed into the backseat. “I bet this is the best birthday party I’ll ever, ever have.”

Dewey thought that was probably true. It was the most wonderful place
she
had ever been. As they drove east, she pressed her face to the window, smiling out at the desert. She closed her eyes and felt the comforting weight of the treasure held tight against her chest. One last present from Papa, a piece of the beautiful green glass sea.

The Kiss

Tia V. Travis

’Twas on the Isle of Capri that I found her

Beneath the shade of an old walnut tree

I can still see the flow’rs blooming round her

Where we met on the Isle of Capri

—“The Isle of Capri,”
Jimmy Kennedy, 1934

T
he angel’s heart was torn from its chest.

The stained-glass box that once held it was smashed; ruby tears scattered the fountain. The ruins of the valentine lay amidst splinters of red glass and oak leaves mottled with rot. Soaked through, it had been half-devoured by birds. I didn’t know whether it had been ripped away strip by ragged strip or swallowed mouthful by mouthful, a bloody delicacy fought over by many. Either way, it came as no shock that there was nothing left but a few anemic tatters. This was a cemetery, after all, and in the land of the dead the birds were reigning lords.

They perched everywhere: on the crypts, on the cypress and oak, on the eaves troughs where the rain ran rivers into the sodden earth. At the funeral forty years ago their ancestors screamed obscenities from the trees as the preacher droned on about love and eternity. Furious screeches and feathered rage. I clutched Sister Constance-Evangeline’s habit in a hailstorm of birds and terror, covering my ears until all I could hear was the rushing of blood…the beating of wings.

But the birds didn’t frighten me now as they did then. I slogged through the mud toward the fountain.

The heart was in ruins but a sinewy strand still twisted around the rusted wire frame. Bleached by sun and leeched by rain, the crepe was white as aged scar tissue. When I touched it, it collapsed into fibers. The last damp mouthful of air trapped within the empty chamber expired on a breath of wind. Gently, I replaced what was left of the heart in the fountain bowl. Stained amber with the sap of cypress needles it seemed more like a Canopic jar, and my heart, my heart lay dead within.

I tried to remember the day when they buried my mother, but I felt as empty as that paper husk. Forty years will do that to you. It wasn’t that I didn’t understand the pain; I just couldn’t feel it anymore.

For stone angels and dead whores there is no pain, I reminded myself. A crepe heart does not beat. A lifeless body does not suffer the ravages of nature’s savage little ways, nor does it endure the gut wrenching of scavengers as they tear it to shreds. For the dead there are no haunting regrets, no aching remorse, no dreams to torment deep into the night. There is no laughter, no music, no dancing. No dream of an Isle of Capri…

Mixed blessings.

The blessings of heartless angels.

The workings of the human heart have always been a mystery to me.

The heart of my mother, Lana Lake, has been the greatest mystery of all. Nothing remains of that heart now but a dry chamber, a mummified fist wrapped around a hardened clot where once had been caged a wild and fiercely beating thing, scarlet and raw as ripped silk.

In the autumn of 1958 when I was eleven years old, my mother, Lana Lake, was bombed out of her mind in the back garden on a bed of crushed birds-of-paradise. She shouted to the sky that spun overhead like a top that I could mix an Angel’s Kiss so coo-coo crazy Frank Sinatra himself would have married me on the spot for one sip of that utterly endsville elixir.

He was between mistresses, Lana said with a wicked wink that blushed me down to my toes. At the wedding, she storied her enraptured audience of one, Francis Albert would stare into my eyes with his cause-for-swooning baby blues. He would hold me tenderly and croon “The Isle of Capri” until it was my bedtime and Mrs. Sinatra arrived to take him home.

I laughed in sheer delight at the possibilities, licking fingers sticky with pomegranate juice. Crimson fingerprints decorated the front of my virgin-white Catholic school blouse. The woolen stockings and sensible shoes had long since been kicked off in favor of squirming bare toes.

It had been Daddy’s idea for me to attend Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow Convent School for girls. I hated his surprisingly stubborn old world ways, making me go just because his mother had, God rest her soul. I couldn’t wait to run home to my own sinning mother, who would lightheartedly endure my tortured catechisms while she painted my toenails an unrepentant shade of Mary Magdalene red.

“So, should I call him?” Lana said in her leading way.

“Frank
Sinatra
?”

She snatched my pomegranate and sucked the bitten part.
“Call the one who loves you only, I can be so warm and tender…”

“No no
no
!” I rolled on the grass, shrieking with laughter.

“He owes me a favor,” Lana added in a low, theatrical voice.

I sat up in a tumble of fallen leaves. “He does?”

“What do you think?” On the tip of her tongue, a jewel glittered. Pomegranate seed, like the one she wore in her navel when she did her routine. It disappeared into her mouth, a ruby on that dancing tongue.
“Call me, don’t be afraid, you can caaalll me, baby it’s late…”

Skip and a jump. That’s what my heart did. Mother really
had
met Frank Sinatra, and every night after that I practically expected The Man With the Golden Charm to appear magically on my doorstep in a tuxedo, with a handkerchief as orange as birds-of-paradise tucked sharp-as-you-please in the breast pocket.

Now that was style, Lana said. Ring-a-ding-ding.

For an aperitif I would serve him an Angel’s Kiss: equal parts white crème de cacao, crème de violette, prunelle, and sweet cream.

That was the Angel’s Kiss.

Too candy-sweet for anyone else, Mother downed them like after-dinner mints after dancing all night at the Cocoa Club.

The Cocoa Club: there was a swinging spot. Peter Lawford, one of Sinatra’s fellow rat-packers, had bought the prohibition clip joint for a song in 1952 and fixed it up. Pink neon martini glasses and palm trees with beckoning fronds out front. It was the place where you went to see and be seen if you were
anybody at all
in the San Francisco Bay area. Tuxedos were de rigueur for the men; the women wore strapless evening dresses and shoulder-length gloves and jewelry from exclusive shops. Every table had little deco lights that lit up the room like diamonds. The waiters with their pencil-thin mustachios swept the tables over their heads like party hats as they glided down the grand staircase to the backlit stage. Best seat in the house, when you slipped them a little something extra.
Duke ’em good!
in Sinatra’s slang book, but he was way too slick to flaunt a bill.

Daddy pounded the pads at the Cocoa Club every night.
Ba da da!
The hottest drummer in town, Joe Caiola would dish it up any way you liked it: slow and swinging or fast and hopping. He’d learned to bang the bongos from the master, Chano Pozo himself, when he and Daddy palled around with Dizzy Gillespie.

Sometimes for a few extra bucks he’d fly down to Los Angeles or to New York or Chicago and sit in with Sam Butera or Artie Shaw’s band or some other swingers who were hip to the beat. Or maybe Sinatra would hire him for a private party in The Tonga Room at the Fairmont and then word would get out about this real gone cat who could really lick those skins, and then everyone else would want him for their parties, too.

Bongos were big back then, and Daddy would get top dollar for those gigs. Sometimes he’d even team up with Tito Contreros or Jack Costanza and then the money would roll in on a cloud of fine Cuban cigar smoke because Sinatra and his pallies were outrageous tippers who partied every night when they were in town. But as hot as Daddy was, my mother was the star attraction.

Lana Lake was a “class act,” Daddy said, even when she stripped down to bare canvas. She was a work of art, a living painting with a beating heart and eyes outlined in fiery yellow like the tropical flowers she loved.

Once when they were doing the bossa nova and thought I was asleep on a stack of records, I saw her slip her tongue into the heart of a bird-of-paradise and I thought I’d die. They danced like they were built for each other, Mother and Daddy: not just the bossa nova but the mambo, the samba, the tango. Lana cocked her hips for Perez Prado and swung to Count Basie and jumped to Louis Prima. There was Sinatra, of course, the Ultimate Big Spender. “Isle of Capri” was Lana’s favorite, though she liked others: “Three Coins in the Fountain” and “Love is the Tender Trap,” and the melancholy “Don’t Cry, Joe” that was like a dance hall after closing.

Daddy would hold Mother close, his dark head buried in her shoulder.
“Amorino, amorino…”
he whispered over and over, like a man lost at sea and found.

Don’t cry, Joe

Let her go, let her go, let her go

Lana’s voice warm and dark as espresso at midnight.

You’ve gotta realize this is the windup

Things will be much better when you make your mind up…

Dancing slow and easy, her hands wrapped in his hair, pulling, pulling…

Daddy could sing, too. But mostly he liked to play the drums, with a subtle, expert flick of his wrists. A true musician, Joe Caiola lost himself in the rhythm, a ghost of a cigarette in the ashtray, a cylinder of burned ash.

Sometimes it would be jazz drumming with lots of metal brushes, with his eyes half-closed like window shades. The fringe of the brushes was like the fringe of his eyelashes sweeping his cheekbone. It was an angular face with too many planes and corners. It sliced shadows in the lamplight and made a chiaroscuro of his features.

“A face you could get cut on,” I’d heard my mother say more than once.

“Or a face you could cut,” Daddy teased back with a swat of brushes.

Tino laughed, ice clinking in his glass with a little
cha cha cha.
Jack Daniel’s and ice. That’s how he liked it. “Maybe a face
Cassie
could cut, eh, Joe?”

Daddy ice-picked a look at him while Mother, poured into a jade silk sheath, slipped out from behind the Chinese screen. The needle swung across Martin Denny’s
Exotica
on the hi-fi. Screeching birds with jeweled plumes, grinning monkeys, and purring leopards, growling things on the prowl in the heart of the jungle where claws cut to the quick.

“You hear what I said, Lana?” Tino lazily tipped back his J.D.

“Don’t tempt me, Tino,” Lana said, waving a finger at him. Polished fingernails the shade of dragonfly wings. “Don’t…”

She smiled at them both with a curve of lips, and most times it would be fine, but sometimes there’d be something behind that smile, a sheet-lightning flash that raised the hairs on my neck.

Sometimes Daddy called Mother his Scarlet Tornado. Sometimes, his Red Flame.

White ice melting red flame, burning the glass, the two as one.

I was alone in the cemetery. The air was wet with late-winter rain that had already soaked me and my shredded heart through the skin. A brisk wind shook a wash of icy drops from the shadow-dark cypresses. It rattled the twisted branches of the live oaks that grew behind the crypt and shed their leaves in the angel’s fountain. All around me stormed a cyclone of needles, of torn black leaves. They whipped around the worn crevices of the headstones with leafy tongues. They clung like leeches to my shivering body. God, I was cold.

I stared at the birds lined up in the trees like snipers. They watched my every movement. Talons raked straight to the heart, deep enough to draw blood. What was I doing here?

Chasing the ghost of a song.

My hands started to shake but I couldn’t leave.

“I
can’t
leave,” I whispered. To the birds, to myself, I wasn’t sure. The wind carried my voice through the branches of the black oaks, rustled the wings of the birds whose eyes had never left me, not once in forty years. I had to hear that song again. I had to know.

In the early 1940s, before I was born, my mother had some throwaway parts in crime movies. She was invariably cast as the siren for whom they dragged the rivers while the opening credits ran:
Murder on the Rocks. The Sweet Kill. Venus Under Glass. Sonata for a Night Angel.
No big studios, no contracts, no options. It was all strictly B-league. Still, Lana’s not inconsiderable on-screen charms had attracted her share of attention, almost all of it male. And while Lana Lake might have been a minor starlet in the Tin-seltown constellation, she shone bright as Polaris in her hometown of Martinez after she decided that dancing and drinking, not moviemaking, were more in tune with her nocturnal rhythms.

Location turned out to be everything of course. Martinez, a shot-glass toss away from San Francisco’s infamous Cocoa Club, was home not only to Lana Lake, but to the equally infamous martini. Mother’s drink of choice was, naturally, Dean Martin’s choice.
The Flame of Love: swirl three drops expensive sherry in an iced stem glass, then pour out. Squeeze one strip of orange peel into the glass and flambé. Throw away the peel. Fill the glass with ice to chill it. Toss out ice. Add very expensive vodka, then flambé another strip of orange peel around the rim. Throw away the peel. Stir very gently.

“I like a new Lincoln with all of its class,”
Mother sang to Daddy while sitting in his lap.
“I like a martini and burn on the glass!”

That was Lana Lake: burn on the glass all the way.

Myself, I’d never experienced the forbidden and fermented fruits of the Cocoa Club. And liberal as Lana was, she still couldn’t slip me under the velvet ropes and into the backdoor of the smoky nightspot.

To make up for it, she rehearsed her act for us in the living room, for Daddy and me, and maybe some of the boys in the band who always seemed to be lounging around there, smoking and joking, or tinkling “Street Scene ’58” on the piano, because sooner or later, everyone ended up at our house.

Including Daddy.

Lana’s little trick started like this: first she would disappear behind the Chinese screen—
Chinoise, en français,
she explained in her crazy put-on accent, not quite French, not quite anything. Then she would slink out from behind the screen with a wink of an emerald eye.