Poe's Children (58 page)

We listened, Mother and I. I closed my eyes and leaned back in her arms. After a moment she started to hum softly. Snapped her fingers. Staring across the garden at the picket fence next door, she sang in a low voice:
“She gets too hungry for dinner at eight—”

The bedroom window was open. The pane refracted a dazzle of light. Someone stirred behind the muslin curtain, ever so slightly.

Singing louder, now:
“She loves the theater, but never comes late!”
Mother tumbled me to my feet. Eucalyptus shells sprayed from my skirt as she swept me across the garden.

I grinned at Mother, but she wasn’t looking at me. Not at me.

“Sing it with me, baby!” she cried.
“She loves the theater, but never comes late!”

Thoughts of mysterious whores vanished. I sang the only words I could remember, sang them off-key, at the top of my lungs:
“SHE’D NEVER BOTHER WITH PEOPLE SHE’D HATE!”

Lana wasn’t dancing now. A smile twisted her lips as she stared straight at the window.

Big finale, now, lots of brass. I did a cartwheel and belted it out:
“THAT’S WHY THE LADY IS A TRAMP!”

The curtains in the house next door snapped shut.

Mother blew a kiss.

I collapsed in the grass, sweaty and breathless and gassed to be alive.

In the Whispering Pines Cemetery, the wind stole the kiss I blew and carried it back to the curtain of trees, the spying eyes in the branches. Hair lashed my eyes and I turned away. I gazed up at the stone angel, at the gaping cavity in its chest where its life had gushed, and the wings that hooked a silver awning of sky. In the corner of one eye balanced a single teardrop: spider. A delicate leg caught in a shred of web quivered in the wind like an eyelash. Eternally poised, I knew the arachnid teardrop would never fall. The spider was long-dead, and its hollow shell had, over time, become a crust of sleep in the angel’s eye.

The angel’s dry eye.

God weeps no tears for whores.

A roosting magpie, thief of hearts, cawed from the cypress with bony branch-wings dark as dusk. Soon night would roll in on the back of a rumbling thunderhead. I grit my teeth hard, my knuckles whitening on the marble ankles.

Why had she done it? I didn’t know—how could I? All I knew was that the angel’s heart had not been torn out, then. Not yet. The heart still beat, if only for a few moments more. It felt everything. Knew everything. Told everything. It whispered a single word: a wet red kiss blown to me from across a kitchen floor, from the lips of the dying to the heart of the living.

One kiss, one word.

Summertime was nearly over

Blue Italian sky above

One kiss, one word.

I said, “Lady, I’m a rover

Can you spare a sweet word of love?”

One word was enough. I never forgot what Mother had whispered while she lay on the floor, her life seeping away from her, from me, in the burnished brass light of that autumn afternoon. But I’d misunderstood what she meant by it.

Until this moment. Maybe, until this moment.

It was this remembering that had carried me back to the angel’s arms.

Remembering and time, and dreams and hearts, and forgotten songs and dying angels. The kiss of angels, painted and real and dancing and drunk, with lips wide open and hearts torn out, as sweet as crème de cacao.

Mrs. Caiola never did leave Daddy. She’d threatened to a thousand times but there was no way in hell she’d give him his freedom so he could be with
her.
That’s how Daddy told it, when he and Mother stayed up talking and I caught snatches of their heated discussions in the other room.

Then there were the accusations and counteraccusations pitched back and forth through the night like hardballs from the house next door. Begging on both sides.
Cassandra, this is crazy. You know it isn’t any good. Why don’t you let me go? Not on your life, Joe. Not on your GODDAMNED life.

Then she’d turn on the waterworks. That’s what Mother called them, with a snort.

I knew about waterworks.

“What does the water in the convent fountain taste like, Capri?” she asked me once, squeezing my hands. “Jesus’ tears?”

“Crème de cacao,” I answered, giggling.

An angel’s kiss….

Sunday afternoons, after the Cocoa Club shakedown, I poured and mixed the Angel’s Kisses carefully. I set them on a tray inlaid with opal dragons that wound round it like the painted twin on Lana’s neck. Then I took them on tiptoe to her boudoir. Stolen sips of Angel’s Kisses. I used to think in sweet rapture: she’s like that. An Angel’s Kiss, as pure as bliss….

Mother, lying in bed with a sleeping mask strewn on the sheets like a leftover from a masquerade, sipped her drink. “Mmm. Just the thing for that Mood Indigo,” she confided.

“The mood indigo?”

Shadow of a smile. “Mood Indigo, baby.”

Through Mother’s bedroom window I watched Cassandra Caiola
click-click-click
down the front walk in high heels and a Christian Dior suit. Her hair was pulled tightly back from her made-up face, not a strand out of place. She paused, frowning, fastening the little buttons on her gloves. I’d never seen her go anywhere without those gloves. Perfect and pristine and white as ice. She called Daddy’s name sharply as she unlocked the door to her Cadillac, so shiny you could see your reflection in it. White, just like her gloves.

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

Mother and Cassandra: fire and ice.

I watched Daddy amble out of the house and toss his cigarette on the sidewalk. Slouch his hat forward.
Slam.

“You know that wasn’t our arrangement, Joe.” Backing out. “
You
said you wanted the brat. And far be it for
me
to stand in your way, especially since you’d already knocked her up. Though God only knows what
that
one will turn—” squeal of rubber “—with a mother like—” Frosted lips in a rearview mirror.

Daddy not looking at her. Tapping a rhythm on the dash.

“You
know
what an understanding woman I am, Joe. You
know
I am. But I’ve had just about enough of living right next door to that—that—”

Sigh. “Why don’t you just let me go, then, Cassandra.”

We never heard the reply as the Cadillac peeled down the driveway.

Lana lay languidly in bed. She lifted her glass. “To sweethearts and wives,” she said wryly. “May they never meet.”

The Angel’s Kiss.

Full on the lips.

It was time that carried me to Whispering Pines and the place where my mother lay wrapped in her past like a skein of stars. It was time, chased by that ghost of a song I couldn’t quite remember, and couldn’t quite forget. And now I stood with the iron door swinging wide behind me.

The wet northern California wind blew at my back, bringing with it a smattering of soaked oak leaves. Inside the crypt it was dim, but there was still a little dying light. I knew I’d be able to see what I needed to see.

I had to see Mother’s rich red lips while Sinatra sang the word and Lana spoke it with that terrible hurt, that desperate pleading in her eyes. One word.

One sweet word of love

For a moment I wasn’t sure if the suitcase record player I’d left for her would still be there. Somehow, I’d always imagined otherworldly hands spiriting it and Lana away, at last, to that elusive Mediterranean isle. But there it was, as it had waited in the vault the last four decades. Beside it, beneath a thick layer of dust, lay the laminated cover of Frank Sinatra’s
Come Fly with Me.
Old Blue Eyes, now dust himself, his voice echoing in a tomb.

I picked up the record. It smelled of damp, of decay, of shut-in places. But in my mind, a song rang out that was gay and swinging, a song that was really going somewhere. A song brimming with sparkling vino and Italian palazzos and illicit romance. It was the song that once carried me away to a villa on the Isle of Capri, an isle of tangerine sunsets and whispered words of love.

I stood with my eyes closed, swaying to a song I heard only in memory. And, swaying, I remembered at last the song I had forgotten.

The weeklies sizzled with stories of Mother tossing full glasses of champagne in men’s faces. Stories of stinging slaps that rang through the room. Her fits of temper were legendary, as was her childish pouting, her brooding silences and black depressions when she’d scratch the needle across “The Isle of Capri” again and again. Sometimes Daddy would walk in whistling some tune kicking around in his head, all unsuspecting with hands in his pockets, and she’d spring like a cobra. Back him into a corner. He’d grin at her and throw up his hands in surrender, and she’d spit out, “Joe, you really are a sonofabitch.” Then she’d kiss him hard and bite his lip until it bled.

It was a savage dance, that give and take of love they had, stronger and wilder than any act the Cocoa Club had ever witnessed. No one was particularly surprised when Lana Lake and Joe Caiola turned up dead in a pool of red on her kitchen floor. A man between two houses, between two worlds—ice-cold wife in one, red-hot mistress and child in the other. Maybe
Mrs.
Joe Caiola could put up with an “arrangement” like that, but not a wildcat like Lana Lake. People like Lana, their passions boiled over like a pot of sauce on the stove.

I remember everything about that moment: Lana’s chili-pepper-red toreador pants…the smell of Daddy’s favorite Napoli spaghetti sauce bubbling like Mount Vesuvius before a blast…the pungent odor of garlic and garden oregano and Roma tomatoes the color of arterial blood…the gun on the floor by Lana’s bare feet. Red lacquer, chipped on the pinkie.

I remember the pain and horror in Mother’s eyes, the silent pleading, the grasping fingers, the choking sound she made as she tried to speak….

I tried to picture that kitchen now: blood that had pooled and seeped into linoleum now badly discolored. Knife on a butcher block where decades-old onions had shriveled up like blackened flies. An apron stained with sauce the color of blood, and an icebox filled with dried-out spaghetti. A forty-year-old menu that never changed.

Old Blue Eyes hit it on the head:
She wore a lovely meatball on her finger.

It turned out Daddy had been shot through the heart with a bullet from the same .22 automatic Tino Alvarez gave Lana to protect herself from the nuts who were always hitting on her at the club. She’d even used it once, shot a man in the crotch without an ounce of remorse. Clutching the bloody mess in his pants he’d stumbled to the bar on the corner where he soused what was left of his manhood in a glass of scotch because a guy there told him he’d heard somewhere it made a pretty good disinfectant. The screams were heard clear to the next county.

So the story ran, anyhow…. The tabloids had a parade with it. Mother was acquitted and after that, everyone in town knew about the .22 locked in the nightstand. Everyone. And men knew better than to tangle with Lana Lake.

Everyone also knew how Mother wanted Joe Caiola all to herself for years, and how things would never, ever be the way she wanted them, not while Cassandra was kicking up her little white pumps in protest. It was the standard story: one too many nights, one too many fights. And it wasn’t too hard for people to picture Lana storming off to the bedroom in tears, banging open the nightstand, fumbling around for the gun….

Maybe she’d even meant to go after Cassandra, but it never got as far as that. Somehow the gun went off. Lana herself was probably as surprised as hell. And what was left now with Joe lying dead on the floor? Snake eyes, no matter which way you rolled it, and nothing left to do but squeeze the trigger one more time.

Don’t cry, Joe.

Let her go, let her go, let her go…

God, let him go.

What do you say, baby…you and me on the Isle of Capri….

Don’t joke, Joe.

I thought a lot about that gun. About Mrs. Joe Caiola. About how Cassandra had bought our house the day after the funerals. It stood there for the next forty years. Boarded up, falling into disrepair, a sprawling bungalow choked in a stranglehold of climbing vines as thick as a dragon’s body. The vines bled green in the rain, and the rain seeped into the ground.

Over the years I’d often wondered how the sunlight would look as it filtered through the windowpanes in the house where, once upon a time, I’d danced in a dream. Heavy, still green light that made everything look as though you were seeing it through a glass-bottomed boat, a sleepy lagoon.

It was a haunted house in every sense, wrapped in its secrets, and its faded Chinese screens, and its un-drunk bottles of crème de cacao, now crystallized sugar. All those unmixed Angel’s Kisses.

Sweetcream dreams, sour-curdled by time.

I don’t know how long I stood like that in the tomb, but when I opened my eyes it was almost dark and Sinatra’s smile was a flicker in the moonlight. I put the record down. Touched the casket wrapped in its sensuous cloak of dust. I held my breath as I lifted the lid—carefully, carefully—and the dust fell from it in sparkles, the spent lanterns of weary fireflies.

There were those who said that Lana Lake was buried naked in the sapphire-blue mink stole Joe Caiola had once draped over her milk-white shoulders.
Confession
magazine reported, with more than a hint of morality, that they had buried her in her g-string.

I tried to imagine that g-string, swinging across the cavern of my mother’s caved-in pelvis, a glittering rope bridge over a sea of peacock feathers now powdered to iridescent dust.

I didn’t know for certain what I would find in that box.

But my breath caught in my throat when I saw her hair. Still red as blood. Dried blood. I thought of the heart I had made all those years ago, that childish cathedral of paper and wire, now rusted away. My eyes drifted down to the bird-of-paradise I’d twisted between her fingers, entwined swan necks. A ghost of fragrance still lingered in the withered blooms. I blinked back the tears that balanced on my lashes.