The Fire Night Ball (3 page)

On Saturday afternoon, Marlena Bellum and Dr. Chloe Vye had kicked off their long delayed reunion by having a couple of drinks at B. L. Zebub's. Faith Bellum wasn't there yet; her train from Rapid City was arriving later in the evening. Marlena had ordered gin and dubonnet cocktails for them both.

"It's Queen Elizabeth's drink," she informed Chloe, “a house specialty."

Marlena then gave Chloe a behind-the-scenes hotel tour, running down the high points of their success story. Chloe's books took her on world tours and she was seldom at home, but even so, Marlena felt embarrassed she hadn't invited her older cousin to the Alta Hotel. The truth was, she had pushed her family away in recent years, assuming they wouldn't tolerate her situation. Now Chloe and Mama were all the family she had left.

As they returned to the lobby, she began to feel sick to her stomach again and quickly excused herself to go to the ladies' lounge.

When the heavy, carved wooden door swung shut behind her, a frothy mass of spittle hit her directly in the right eye, bubbling and burning as the spray found its mark.

“Be gone, witch! Thou art accursed! If you fail to heed my warning, there will be two deaths on your head before the bonfires are extinguished!"

The big woman's massive head was entirely swathed in a purple turban. There was a wilted corsage pinned to her chest, right at the level of Marlena's nose. The mingled odor of sweat and dead roses on Mrs. Brown-Hawker's heaving bosom made her feel nauseated.

Accursed? Really?

Letty shook a fat finger in her face and bellowed: "Marlena Bellum, I call you out as the reincarnation of Cassandra Vye and the devil's spawn! I invoke the hexing of Goody Brown against your evil spirit!"

As Marlena tried to get past, her antagonist ranted, “There’s gambling, drinking, and fornicating going on all day in this devils' den. But you took it upon yourself to hide Mr. Drake behind your skirts and protect him from ME. Shame on you! Take care, Marlena Bellum. God rewards the innocent and punishes the wicked in this town. Remember, He punished the cold-hearted witch with the red hair whose blood courses in your veins. He will wreak vengeance on you and your paramour for opening Alta's doors to Satan!”

Marlena calmly wiped the spittle from her face. “I’m sorry, but I have no idea what or whom you’re raving about, Letty. Will you please let me go by, or do I have to call for security?”

"You and Drake was laughin' at your betters, and you throwed my letter in your waste can. A God-fearing woman from my church saw you do it. You were in a hotel room together, though you're bound to others by solemn vows in church. It's known hereabouts, Satan's whore, that Cassandra's evil powers are yours. And an untimely death awaits men who make the fatal mistake of consortin' with your kind.”

Then Letty repeated her opening threat. "Be gone, witch! Thou art accursed! If you fail to heed my warning, there will be two deaths on your head before the bonfires are extinguished!"

“Let me pass, please!”

There'd been a struggle, but somehow she’d got past the draped bulk of Mrs. Brown-Hawker and fled into a stall.

"A community of unforgiving souls" was how one outsider had described a cult of religious fanatics among the natives of Alta. This wasn't the first time these bigots had raised their ugly heads. Letty had been hell-bent on a mission to close them down for the past six months, ever since the fifth anniversary celebration of the hotel’s opening.

The event was held on July 10, 1977, a propitious day of blazing sun and a cloudless sky colored a robin’s egg blue. The festivities were carefully planned to coincide with the anniversary of the Wyoming Territory becoming the 44th state in 1890. A day of pomp and ceremony was planned on the grounds of the 200acre hotel property.

On hand were the Lieutenant Governor, the heads of the Union Pacific and Chicago, Burlington, and Quincy Railroads, the president of the Iron Workers Association (founded in 1901), and a representative of the DOE, to whom Jimmy Carter had transferred management after re-opening the rich Wyoming oil field reserves to counteract the Arab Oil Embargo of 1973-74.

The publisher of the Casper Star-Tribune was not on hand, but Drake was the biggest advertiser in the newspaper founded in 1891, and so the Star had sent instead an Overland Stage Company replica for the short parade that started off the festivities at 10 a.m.

On another horse-drawn vehicle, pageant players representing frontiersmen, trappers, prospectors, and homesteaders from the late 1880’s sang songs from the Oregon Trail, interspersed with the peals of a fire bell from 1876 and tunes on a 1900 calliope. The parade ran along Sacajawea Pathway, a private two-mile stretch leading up Alta Mountain to the hotel’s massive stone facade.

The parade was led off with a flourish by the Troopers, a Wyoming drum and bugle corps of national fame. Several female hotel staff were said to have swooned while watching the practice session the previous night under the lights on a local football field. It was hot, unseasonably so; the buffed lads had their shirts off and their horns held high.

Industry press was well represented, including one of the foremost food critics in the nation. Slated for the speechifying event were the head of Amoco Oil Refinery, a tribal chieftain from the Black Hills, and, of course, Harry Drake, the king of the mountain. To enthusiastic applause, the three men were splendidly carted to the front of the grandstand (which was draped in the Wyoming flag and Drake’s ancestral Scottish banner) in a white carriage drawn by two Morgan houses named Indian Paintbrush and Pathetic Fallacy.

From the eagle-eyed perspective of its young director, the anniversary ceremonies went off without a hitch. Marlena felt as though her fairy godmother had waved a wand. The local dignitaries were on time and stayed sober, the microphones worked, and Harry’s welcoming speech was well received. Flags flew in the sparkling sky; sleek black limousines lined the entranceway; and, after an informal winemakers' reception in the banquet hall, the food critic, well oiled by the vintage wines, went to his suite smacking his lips over the vichyssoise, Prince Edward Island mussels, potato strips fried in duck fat, thinly slivered carpaccio, and foie de gras petit fours.

In the glistening success story that would be reported in all the major travel magazines, there would be two incidents which weren’t covered but which marred and soured the occasion.

The first occurred during the ceremonial aftermath. Over the objection of a small native faction, a new traffic stoplight had been installed at the intersection of Sacajawea Pathway and Hatter’s Field Road, the thoroughfare angling directly into Alta proper. A souped-up Camaro driven by a young male cousin of Thom Hawker ran the red light, colliding with the horses drawing the empty white carriage. Indian Paintbrush was euthanized at the scene while his partner, Pathetic Fallacy, sadly looked on. At noon, the young man lost his leg in Alta Hospital.

The second incident carried repercussions that appeared equally serious in the minds of some religiously reborn natives who had objected, for five fruitless years, to the demonic nomenclature of the private club hidden within the bowels of Drake’s glamorous hotel.

At ten p.m., dressed only in his birthday suit, a tipsy guest went out to fill his ice bucket, then wandered into the lobby to get assistance on finding his room.

His nakedness amused the front desk staff. But it elicited loud, outraged shrieks from a grim-faced knot of elder natives standing in the lobby. Led by Letty Brown-Hawker and her husband, Thomas Hawker III, they were members of a newly re-opened WCTU chapter, which had recently been referred to by a Casper newspaper columnist as “the stillborn offshoot of a dead tree."

While their cause was dead to most, these natives were very much alive and extremely vocal. They’d assembled after a four-hour sunset prayer meeting to protest once again an establishment dedicated to Satan. “Purity before Profit,” they chanted with raised signs that called for a boycott of all Drake enterprises. They did so until escorted off property by security.

From Marlena’s perspective, the only downside to the nudity incident was that it hadn't been perpetrated by visiting celebrity. He was merely a New York advertising executive, so the colorful mishap wouldn't be picked up by the national press.

However, for the owner-developer it was no laughing matter because a week later, Harry Drake received an indignant letter from Letty Brown-Hawker. Co-signed by ten Baptist and Pentecostal churchmen, her letter threatened a boycott of the hotel "by all decent, God-fearing souls in northeast Wyoming" unless the saloon’s name was changed before the first bonfire celebration at Halloween.

"Look at this!" Harry growled, entering Marlena's suite and flinging her the letter. "It's also published in today's local paper."

"I never read that rag," she declared.

Then, taking up the letter, she pretended to read it aloud. “All persons found guilty of committing public improprieties shall be sentenced to a month's hard labor sucking the sweat off Mrs. Brown-Hawker’s thighs, jowls, and double chins.”

As the maid emerged from cleaning the bathroom, Marlena tossed the letter into the leather waste can under her desk. The maid glared at her, then exited, leaving them alone.

Harry tapped his chest. “It’s my hide they’re after now, but they’ll go after yours next. Wait and see. You won't be laughing when a lynch mob shows up here.”

“Phooey. These are the same Jesus freaks who see Santa as an anagram for Satan. They’re nut cases. Ignore them.”

He scowled at her.

"Oh, get off your high horse, darling.”

Tossing her hair, she twirled and whirled, looking in her dance like a glittering cross between a gypsy queen and Rapunzel. Drake's concern with their affront to the community's moral fiber was effectively quashed by a performance that continued passionately in her bed.

During the months following the nudity incident, it seemed Marlena was right, at least from the perspective of Drake’s bottom line. The Alta Hotel received a ton of positive publicity in
Town and Country
,
Cosmopolitan
, and
Esquire
. Travel writers zeroed in on B.L. Zebub’s “risqué, vibrant appeal, rivaled only by Studio 54 in New York and the Monster in Key West.”

"Right in here, Mrs. Bellum.”

"Ms. Bellum, if you don't mind," she said, following the nurse into the examination room.

“Please take off everything except your bra, Miss Bellum,” said the nurse, “and put this gown on with the opening to the back.”

“I never wear a bra,” Marlena said. "Burned mine in '69."

“Then take everything off,” said the nurse matter-of-factly. “You can sit up here on the end of the table. Dr. Huddleston will be right in."

On both coasts, she was thinking, women were cutting wide swaths through barbaric restraints that had for too long held them hostage.
No fault divorce was now available, and abortion was a legal right. On the bathroom mirror, her roommate had slapped a sticker: "Out of the war, out of the home, out of the closet."

In Alta, however, the natives didn't know from Gloria Steinem, though women had got the vote in 1869 and knew how to shoot a bear. In this town, the past loomed large, immovable as Alta Mountain, and certain superstitions ran deep.

Marlena gazed at the documents framed on the wall. There were Dr. Ronald Huddleston’s diploma from Stanford University Medical School and his certification of residency at a St. Louis hospital.

In the second grade, Typhoid Ronnie--so nicknamed because Ron gave her the mumps, chicken pox, measles, and finally scarlet fever--would dip her red-gold braids into his inkwell and torment her with opinions that contradicted her upbringing. He said Catholics were ignoramuses who worshipped graven images and were over-populating Earth.

The scarlet fever she got from him kept her in quarantine while her mother successfully schemed to move her family back East, where Faith had grown up. Yet, despite Ron having been something of a bad luck charm, Marlena was looking forward to seeing him again.

Yesterday, on the pretext of picking up medication for a house-bound patient, Chloe had conned her into taking the royal tour of Ron Huddleston's offices and state-of-the-art medical equipment. She'd quickly seen her old nemesis was that rare thing, a good man and a sexy one.

Chloe had then convinced her to make an appointment. "Regardless of your iron constitution, Lena, you've been complaining of a stomach ache ever since we got here. You might have an inflamed appendix."

In the nineteenth-century novels she'd read as a girl, there was a type of man called “Beauty’s Dog," a fetching title for Ron's sort. The women of Alta could do worse, it was Marlena's opinion, than trust Dr. Ron with their pap smears.

A good man is hard to find, she thought as she settled herself atop the examination table.
But a hard man will come quickly, if you just put your lips together and blow
.

She was wriggling her toes when Ron came striding through the door, his kind, grey eyes twinkling and a broad smile widening his boyish features.

“Howdy,” he said, dropping his gaze to scan her chart. “Was it yesterday you and Dr. Vye came by, or was that a dream?”

"A nightmare, you mean. Now it appears you can't get rid of me."

Ron's hands and trimmed fingernails were immaculate; he was closely shaven, his sideburns long and neat; his full head of auburn hair was carefully gelled and slicked back. When he came closer, holding out his hand, she inhaled a whiff of Bay Rum, her favorite scent.

“Thanks for seeing me on short notice, Ron.”

“No problem. How are you feeling today?”

“The same.”

“So, the nausea you mentioned has continued for more than a week?”

“Yes.”

“Any other symptoms?” With a firm, gentle touch, he began checking her throat and neck for swollen glands.

“I’m having trouble sleeping.”

“Are you taking anything for it?”

“Valium and Brandy Alexanders.”

She added, "That's a joke, Ron."

“I hope so. Combining alcohol and pills can be deadly.” He put the stethoscope on her back and began listening to her lungs. “Now, breathe deeply for me. Once more, a deep breath.” He continued to listen as she took several long breaths.

“Any cough or congestion?”

“No.”

“Dizziness?”

“Some.”

“Abdominal pain other than nausea?”

“Some.”

“Tarry stools?”

“Making this up as you go along? Of course not.”

“Exposure to school children in the past week?”

“Not on my diet.”

As he listened to her heart through his stethoscope, his grey eyes were gazing steadily aside, which allowed her to examine his features. Other than the auburn hair and the pale, unusually long eyelashes, she never would have recognized this serious-looking young doctor for the boy who had sat behind her in second grade.

“Your pulse and blood pressure are normal. Your lungs sound fine. You don’t have any signs of acute appendicitis or our local influenza. Your temperature is slightly below normal.”

“So, other than cold feet, nothing's wrong with me?”

“Hopefully that's the case. Have you had any fainting spells?”

“Sometimes I feel dizzy when I stand up. Maybe I’m channeling the Russian astronaut.”

“When was your last menstrual period?”

“I’m late, but that’s not unusual.”

“How late?”

“Oh, a month or so. Make that two.”

“And you say that’s normal for you?”

“My flow is erratic; the timing's all over the place. Usually it’s heavy, but at the end of October, there was some spotting and that was all she wrote.”
I can’t believe I’m chatting with Typhoid Ronnie about my periods!
He was asking her another question. She asked him to repeat it.

“I said, is there a chance you might be pregnant?”

“Are you serious? Can't be. I've worn an I.U.D for five years.”

“What I meant was, are you sexually active?”

“Oh, I see. Um, yes.” She could feel herself blushing.

The last time was Sunday, when Harry casually strolled in. She'd been out of sorts after waiting for a day and a half. But eventually she gave up pouting and sat on his cock, which was her favorite way to orgasm. Then he'd rolled her over, spanked her, entered her, and come quickly.

But as they parted, he'd spoken to her in way that rankled. As he buckled his belt, towering over her as she lay naked on the bed, he refused to answer her questions about spending time over the holidays. He sounded like a professor delivering a lecture.

“Follow your own inclinations, for your own reasons. I can’t bear on my shoulders the burden of your lonely childhood, Marlena.”

Parting was always unbearable torture for her, especially when he whistled as he walked away. But after that cold message, she'd started to feel physically sick, and she'd been nauseated ever since.

“Using any other form of contraception besides the I.U.D.?” Dr. Ron asked.

“Why? It's foolproof, isn't it?”

“No form of birth control is 100% effective. Sometimes I.U.D.’s spontaneously slip or hang too low to be fully protective. Mind if I take a look?”

“You’re the doctor."

He called the gray-haired nurse back in. Marlena was instructed to put her feet up in the stirrups and lie back.

“Big scoot toward me,” he said. “Just a little more. Good.”

After a few seconds of investigation, he said, "there are no mullerian anomalies."

"Meaning?"

"You don't have two sets of equipment--two vaginas, two cervixes, two uteruses. Sometimes they account for a pregnancy where one wouldn't otherwise be expected."

"I didn't realize there was such a thing."

"It's not that unusual. They occur in one of three thousand women."

"It must lead to some unusual conversations in the bedroom. I can think of another advantage."

"What's that?"

"A woman might claim to be a virgin when she's not, because one hymen is still intact."

"Technically speaking, she'd be right."

"That's the kind of technicality that might save a Muslim woman's life."

When the examination was concluded, Ron waited until the nurse was out of the room, then he turned and put a hand on the table. He was looking directly at her.

"What's wrong with me, doctor?" she asked sweetly. "Will I live?"

“You'll make it to Christmas. That's a joke, Lena. We’ll run a chemical test to confirm it, ” he said, “but I’d estimate you’re about eight weeks pregnant, give or take a couple weeks.”

“But what about my frigging I.U.D.?”

In her seven-year marriage to Codwell Dimmer, they'd used virtually no birth control, and yet she hadn't conceived. When Harry became her sexual Svengali, she’d chosen the I. U. D. for its invisible, highly effective protection.
There simply must be another explanation for her symptoms.

“The I.U.D. was a low hanger, so I removed it. If the test turns out negative and you’re not pregnant, you’ll want to have another inserted or choose a different method, such as the birth control pill. I’ll be glad to help you with any option you choose.”

“
If
I'm pregnant, is it too late to, uh, get rid of it?”

“If it's the first trimester, there's no viability. We don’t do the procedures here, but there’s one clinic in Cheyenne, and many options in San Francisco. I'd be glad to call for you.”

She was glad she'd come to see Ron. An older doctor would've hemmed and hawed, even lectured her on the abortion issue.

Not that it was anyone's fucking business what she did with her own body. My God, she thought, getting knocked up was certainly not part of the grand scheme for her and Harry. She stared at the ceiling, her hands tightly clenched on her stomach.

“Are you all right?”

“No, I’m not all right. According to you, I'm fucking pregnant.”

“Then, a pregnancy at this time wouldn't be desirable?”

“On a scale of one to ten, ten being the least desirable, pregnancy would be an eleven hundred pound gorilla.”

“Forgive a personal question. How would your husband feel about it?”

“Not good. We’re separated.”

“Oh, I'm sorry. Is there anything I can do...as an old friend, I mean?”

She managed a pale smile.“You can join me for a drink, doctor. I’m not in a mood to be drinking alone in my hotel suite.”

“What a lovely idea, Lena. But it’s not yet ten, and I have a roomful of patients. Here, let me give you a hand up.”

“That's why we’re called patients, because we need a lot of it to see you guys. My mother used to say, 'you spend your whole life waiting on some damn man.' Dad could never move fast enough for her."

“I remember your dad. He was quite a funny guy. Didn’t he have a serious accident around the time you left Roosevelt?”

“Literally a ton of coal fell on his legs at New Gillette Electric. We left Wyoming and moved to Cleveland so Austin could have experimental transplant surgery. I attended Cleveland State on scholarship, then the University of Arizona for architecture school. Lucky me, PAD's biggest project happened to land in my home town.”

“Dr. Vye mentioned you’re a kind of social director now for the hotel?”

“I've taken on special events as a consultant, but I still do design work for PAD in San Francisco. I travel back and forth on a regular basis.”

More regular than her periods were. She felt numb, but she could hear herself prattling on. "My PR gig gives me a perfect excuse to hang out at B.L. Zebub’s, where everyone knows my name and what I drink."

“Would the drink offer still be good later this afternoon? My rounds are over around five.”

“Faith's in town for our reunion. But if you come by B.L. Zebub’s at six, I’ll be sure to be there. I can stand only so much family togetherness.”

Though Marlena no longer believed in guilt, a thought that brought a feeling of shame seared her heart. Years ago, she'd slammed the door shut on her parents, rejecting them both without any explanation.

“You can get dressed now. Take all the time you want. We'll call you with the test results, so be sure to leave a phone number where you can be reached.”

“Okay. When may I expect them?”

“Tomorrow evening at the latest. But I may be able to pull some strings.”

“You already have, doctor."

He chuckled. At the door, he turned and said: “Save me a good seat. Tell them I drink Guinness and the name is just Ron.”

"Only the best seat in the house will do for Just Ron."

He gently closed the door.

The wide smile creasing her heart-shaped face gradually faded. She sat on the edge of the examining table, still wearing the blue paper gown.

But though her blue-green eyes were looking out into space, Marlena was feeling not so much spaced-out as she was feeling tuned in. She was focused on her own psyche, a place she seldom visited, much preferring to keep busy.