Poe's Children (57 page)

And then she would dance.

The lights played with the curves of her silhouette on rice paper as satiny-smooth as the head of Daddy’s snare drum. He kept time with the jive of her hips. His shirtsleeves would be rolled up, the collar unbuttoned, his tanned skin dark against his white undershirt. Cigarette half-forgotten in the corner of his mouth as he stared at her. As we all stared at her.

Luis Ramirez whistled. “Now that’s what I call a sweet little cookie,” he said, shaking his head.

“A
fortune
cookie. All wrapped up in Chinese silk,” Daddy said with a proud swish of cymbals. He wasn’t the only one who loved Mother. They all loved her: the boys in the band, and Daddy…and me. Burn on the glass, all the way.

Lana had hundreds of costumes jammed in her closet like piñatas: Spanish bullfighter bolero jacket and a snorting bull painted above her breast. Caravan gypsy with bright scarves and an evil silver blade licking the tip of her rouged nipple. Queen of the Nile in a sleek leopard pelt and a painted python with an amber eye that wound around her narrow waist.

Daddy’s wife, Cassandra (she liked to be called Mrs. Joe Caiola), had called Mother a common whore. Right to her face once, when we ran into her in town. With all those people standing there like a church choir. Nervous titters and uneasy glances all around. Lana Lake was Lana Lake, after all, and there was no telling what she’d do for a slight like that. To everyone’s amazement Mother only smiled, and we kept walking. Still, there was a tightness to her steps. Red dress. Red high heels. Red hair bouncing down her back, burning like her cheeks.

I never understood, then, how it was possible to hate something so unabashedly beautiful. I was transfixed by unrestrained female beauty in a way that only a girl of eleven, uninitiated to the mysteries that awaited the thrust into adulthood, could be. God, how I wanted that life for myself: a hundred handsome boyfriends to drive me anywhere I wanted in a shiny limousine. And a private jet to fly me to the Isle of Capri.

They should burn that damn club down,
Mrs. Caiola said. She was arguing with Daddy in the house next door. It was a scorching summer morning; all the windows were open. You couldn’t help but hear her.

Burn it down…

My nostrils singed with blazing palm fronds, scorched maître d’s, bandstands showering sparks, highball glasses exploding like a string of firecrackers behind the bar. I envisioned incinerated skeletons locked in charred embraces, teeth clattering on the dance floor like smoky pearls. Would they really burn it down?

But the Cocoa Club remained open despite Cassandra Caiola. A glorification of all things sinful: a palace of pleasure, a den of desire.

Sometimes Lana wore a g-string of tiny pagodas and the spangled pasties of Imperial China. On those formal occasions Mother, with an artist’s steady hand and a little silver mirror, would paint an oriental dragon that began at her left breast and licked the nape of her neck with a forked tongue. When Lana breathed, the dragon breathed, and my heart pounded with excitement. When she danced…it was like watching the unfolding of an origami bird. The Emperor’s Nightingale with nipples like ripe raspberries. Her arms moved like vines, slim as the necks of Ming vases. The dragon sank its claws into her creamy skin, wrapped its serpentine body around her breasts, and swayed with every gyration, swayed with us all….

Other times Mother slipped into a sky-blue dress of chiffon that concealed nothing. Then she painted an angel on her breast, plucking a harp of pure gold. Daddy said that when she danced with the angel, she danced with God, and the chiffon floated around her like a cloud.

When he told me that, I wished, how I wished, that Sister Constance-Evangeline would take me to the Cocoa Club to see Mother dance, just once. I knew she’d never do it, though her rosary had even fewer beads than Lana’s g-string, and the g-string was strung with heavenly blue glass instead of dead brown seeds that grew nothing at all.

In the cemetery.

Beyond the angel to the crypt itself.

Passing years and the wash of vintage wine-country rains in the Northern California valley had smoothed its curvilinear lines to a winding shell that seemed to curl in upon itself. Glistening beneath a sheen of rain, it had a dreamlike, almost translucent quality. In graceful script:

LANA LAKE

December 24, 1926—October 4, 1958

An unknown admirer—some gossiped about a movie star carrying a torch or a lovedrunk Mafioso with money to burn—had laid out the green for Lana’s lavish but astonishingly tasteful crypt and the guardian angel with its wings outstretched to the heavens. Mountains of fresh flowers had, for years, been delivered weekly. Lana’s favorite birds-of-paradise, with petals shading from the palest saffron to the burnt orange of twilight over a bottomless lake.

More than a few had disapproved of this extravagance, hardly befitting an ex-starlet and second-rate nightclub performer. Especially one who’d expressed her passions in such an explicit way. But such was the mystique of a dead exotic dancer, the kind whose name is inevitably more notorious in death than in life.

I thought about that life as I leaned my cheek against the angel’s cool base. I clasped a pale ankle, traced the angel’s serene expression with the back of my hand. The stone was crumbling, braceleted with Medusa-green moss. As I breathed, vapors swirled in the chill air. They reminded me of the frescoed clouds on the ceiling of the chapel where God created Man, in the country where my father, too, had been created. But whether it was my breaths, or God’s, or those of the stone angel that formed those curlicues, I could not tell. In the fading light the angel’s lips seemed to move, to form pearls of condensation with every exhalation, to whisper words in a language almost too perfect, too divine, to be heard.

She whispered softly, “It’s best not to linger,”

Then as I kissed her hand I could see…

God, how I wanted to see. To sing. To remember. There was so much life here, so much unfinished. The stones, the earth, the oaks sang with it. I couldn’t leave. Not now. Chasing the ghost of a song. So many songs…

In 1958 my hair was the bane of my existence. There was nothing coo-coo crazy about it. It was fine and straight and utterly
Clyde.
Lana insisted it was as fine as bone china, but who wanted hair like a tea party when you could have hair like a Bloody Mary? Lana’s was dark and rich, a sinuous red fire. When she danced she coiled it on her head to accentuate her long and erotic neck.

I, however, was profoundly dissatisfied with my looks. Summing up all the pre-adolescent fervor I could muster I announced: “I HATE my hair. I want YOUR hair.”

Loving me too much to laugh, Mother still couldn’t prevent her lips from playing with a smile. Her hands moved like silk, in sweeping brushstrokes. “Well, your hair isn’t exactly like mine, but that makes it no less beautiful, barefoot contessa.” She was wearing a chemise that skimmed the tops of her thighs. In the day she lived in chemises.

“What’s a contessa?” I asked. I was still disconsolate with my lot in life.

Lana French-inhaled her cigarette. I couldn’t tell what she was thinking. “A contessa is…a beautiful rich lady who lives in a castle.”

I straightened suddenly. “On the Isle of Capri?”

Lana let out an explosive little laugh. Smoke jetted through her nostrils. “Yes, yes, yes, on the Isle of Capri.”

I settled back, satisfied, sinking into her hypnotic brushstrokes. “Daddy wants to take us to the Isle of Capri someday,” I reminded her. Daddy had been to Capri. He’d told us he’d take us there lots of times.

“Mmmhmm….”

I dreamed awhile. Idly, I supposed: “Would Daddy marry you if you were a contessa?”

Mother stopped brushing, just for an instant. The hairbrush tightened in her hand. A crackle of static. In my daydream I hardly noticed.

“Daddy can’t have two wives,” Mother said. She set the hairbrush on the vanity with a finality that was lost on me.

I thought about Daddy’s wife, Cassandra, the crazy lady who lived next door. The one who called Mother a whore and who was always watching us from behind the curtain. Cassandra was rich and
almost
as beautiful as Mother, and the glossy white house she and Daddy lived in could
almost
have been a castle. But I was pretty sure she’d never been to the Isle of Capri.

A thought struck me. “Do you think Frank Sinatra would marry me if I were a contessa?”

Lana, distracted, suddenly looked at me. She laughed unexpectedly and wrapped her arms around me from behind. “Why not? You’re Sicilian
and
Catholic. You could make an Angel’s Kiss to knock his socks off.” She smiled at me in the mirror. “He’d go wild for you. Coo-coo crazy.”

“I’m only
half
Sicilian,” I corrected her. My tone was reproachful and smacked of Sister Constance-Evangeline’s elocution class.

“But you are a full Catholic,
and to show my devotion to thee, I consecrate to thee my eyes, my ears, my mouth, my heart, my entire self.
Shake with it, sugar, shake with it.”

Shake with it, I did not. I hated convent school. I hated the dour nuns at Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow who refused to let me run barefoot through the arched courtyard where the pear trees burst with juice and there was cool black soil I was dying to sink my toes into. The pears, I was warned sternly, were not to be eaten. They were full of worms.

Mother’s breasts were like the heavy flesh of ripe pears. After she and Daddy were dead and buried I’d sit beneath those trees for hours, sucking the golden skins and thinking of nothing, nothing at all, until there was nothing but a pile of rotting cores.

Kicking my heels at Lana’s vanity table I complained that Sister Constance-Evangeline was always after me to get to confession.

“A little confession is good for the soul,” Mother said, painting my lips with a little stiff brush. She had never attended convent school. She said it was too late for her; that she’d been on God’s shit list for years.

I surmised I probably had been, too.

“Oh, no, honey. Not you. Make like you’re going to kiss someone,” Lana instructed. “Like this—”

I exaggerated a movie-star pout. I had never kissed anyone. Not for
real.
Sometimes the girls practiced with movie magazines they hid under their pillows. But kissing boring old pieces of paper with ads for underarm deodorant on the backs wasn’t like it would be in real life. Was it?

“Perfect!” Mother dabbed with the brush. “You look like Frida Kahlo. Or Carmen. Tell Daddy to buy the opera for you, you crazy chick!”

Later Daddy came in with some of the boys, Sam and Luis, and Chuy Hernando, and Tino Alvarez and Domingo. Daddy laughed and said, “Hey Tino, she looks more like Carmen
Miranda
!” Then he swirled me up in the air with my glitzy red lips and glitzy red toenails the color of the wax cherries on the Chiquita’s famous turban. He swung me around just like Lana said Frank Sinatra would at our wedding, and the boys clapped a quick Latin rhythm and Lana did a little swing of her hips against Domingo’s, and I could not, at that moment, have been happier.

A little confession…

Mother died before she could confess. I wondered what Sister Constance-Evangeline would have made of that. The murder/suicide was a wet-dream for the tabloids, who’d pronounced it “an act of passion.”
Amorrazo.
Joe Caiola wouldn’t leave his wife for the temperamental showgirl. Ergo, the temperamental showgirl shot him, then shot herself, straight through the heart.

Ring-a-ding-ding. One, two, three.

Thoroughly drenched in Mother’s perfume, I whispered scented Hail Marys for her in church. After I’d finished Sister Constance-Evangeline scoured my neck, my wrists, the backs of my knees, all the secret places, until the skin bled pomegranate-red under the faucet. Watching the red wash down the sink, I wondered: did dead whores go to heaven?

I gripped the marble angel’s ankles, tighter now. I was dreaming of a girl who ran through the damp earth in the garden like a barefoot contessa, hair a wildfire, copper leaves falling around her like pennies in the autumn wind. I tried to remember the song that whistled through her painted red lips as she pounded up the porch steps trailing birds-of-paradise in both fists, her tongue clicking against her teeth like a castanet. I remembered the girl, innocent then and unafraid, as she clattered open the screen door and ran, barefoot, into the heart of a nightmare. But after forty years, the song had stuck in my throat.

My eyes ached from the blinding white marble, the blinding white sky. I stared at the heart in the fountain. It was drained and pale. But it became for me another heart: my mother’s heart, pumping wet and red and hard through the splinters of a ribcage that gleamed white as the wings of the angel gracing her left breast.

The angel had bled a halo of red.

The red was everywhere, a flutter of smears on Mother’s hands and face like the frantic sweep of butterfly wings. The red was on Daddy’s face, too. Mother was bent over him on the floor in a widening pool of blood, her mouth pressed tightly to the third finger of his left hand in the rich, wet kiss of one who loves deeply. It was not her own wedding ring she kissed.

She looked up at me as I banged through the screen door. A bubble of blood escaped her lips.

And it burst, like the world, around us all.

Mother and Daddy and Cassandra and me.

The four of us, together. As we always would be.

Red flame and thieving birds, the two burned into one. Blood and ashes.

My shoulders heaved as I held the statue. I wanted to cry, but no tears came.

“What’s a whore?” I asked Mother the afternoon Mrs. Caiola had called her that in the street. Instantly, I chewed my tongue in regret. Mother’s lips twitched. Without a word she drew me into arms as cool as a Tom Collins. The breeze rustled musically through the leaves of the eucalyptus trees in the backyard. The sound of a thousand chopsticks, swish swish….