When Venus Fell (3 page)

As long as I could remember, I knew we Arinellis of low-country Louisiana had a special bond with the Camerons of high-country Tennessee. I put a voodoo love spell on Gib Cameron the year Mom retired from her singing career and our family settled in New Orleans. I was six years old. Mom wanted to stay home with us and be the kind of Donna Reed-type mother she had wished for hopelessly when she was a girl.

Pop would have given her the moon if she had asked. New Orleans and Donna Reed were easy then. I believed my father could accomplish anything. He was a very successful composer and all-around brilliant jazz man. Although he was half-Japanese, with black hair and golden skin, he stood over six feet tall and his eyes were gray. As a kid I watched as restaurant maître d’s called for Max Arinelli then did double takes when Pop stepped forward. He was raised Catholic but he had no god he would speak of. He brought up Ella and me in the Church only because Mom wanted it that way.

Mom was the blond daughter of a hard-drinking Louisiana truck-stop guitar player named Big Jane Kirkelson. Big Jane died young and my mother, a southern nobody
with the strangely redneck-Nordic name of Sherry Ann Kirkelson, was taken in by a Catholic foster home, which turned her loose at eighteen, a loving, morally determined girl with a pretty singing voice and ambitions. She got a job with an early-sixties ditty-bop girls band then moved to New York, where she managed to earn a respectable career as a backup singer by the time she met Pop. By then, Sherry Kirkelson had become Shari Kirk.

We had plenty of money when we moved back to Mom’s home state. Pop bought a nightclub in the French Quarter and began remodeling it. He created elegant dining rooms and fine jazz music, champagne brunches and smooth blues. I think his combined devotion to Mom, Ella, me, and the nightclub would have been enough to protect him from his demons for the rest of his life.

Ella and I had Pop’s soft black hair and slightly hooded eyes, but the color was green, like Mom’s. People might imagine our Asian grandmother peeking out through our eyes if they tried hard, but my sister and I were more mysterious than exotic. We felt perfectly secure among the heat-steamed blossoms of New Orleans nightclub society, where our mixed-race father fit in easily with the Cajuns and Creoles and Africans and other varieties and mixtures of humanity that made that world so exciting.

Our house in the old-money Garden District was filled with luxuries I took for granted, with joy and passionate music that was as much a part of me and my family as the blood in our veins, and with fervent left-wing political meetings that would have gotten Pop blacklisted for life during the McCarthy era.

Pop’s fire-breathing friends would have been stunned to know about Mom’s long friendship and correspondence with Gib Cameron’s family. Even Pop cherished that bond, deep down, though he never admitted it. He couldn’t bring himself to say he respected and admired a family so all-American they must bleed red, white, and blue.

I think he feared we would always be measured against
standards the Camerons epitomized. Compared to them and their two centuries of pioneer Scottish American history we barely deserved to pledge allegiance to the flag. Cameron ancestors had settled the colonial wilderness of Tennessee’s mountains, built themselves an estate of enduring grandeur, and were the centerpiece of social and civic life in the southern heartlands. We homegrown Arinellis were a twentieth-century creation, scraping for acceptance, only one generation removed from all things foreign and exotic and therefore vaguely notorious.

When I was a child Mom happily told and retold the story of her and Pop’s wedding at Cameron Hall. In 1968 my parents were on tour in Nashville, Tennessee, with a Top 40 show called
Dance Parade
, which was sponsored by Decca Records. Mom and Pop heard about an inn that had just opened high in the mountains east of Nashville—wild, beautiful, difficult territory that the lowland world still regarded with awe and, occasionally, fear.

Mom didn’t confess that she and Pop weren’t married when she called to reserve a room, and Gib’s family never thought to ask. Those years in the late sixties were the last gasp of social innocence—or at least the pretense of innocence.

The Camerons took my parents in as if they were kinfolk, a welcome my mother never forgot, because she had no family, and neither did Pop. Pop proposed to her there, and the Camerons organized a quick wedding in their own family chapel.

It was amazing that Mom and Pop married at all; Pop always said he wouldn’t let the government sanctify
any
part of his life, and he considered marriage certificates one more way the government sought to regulate people. Yet he married Mom and loved her dearly, just as he loved my sister and me. I’ve never doubted that.

Mom and Pop wrote a song on their wedding day titled “Evening Star,” which hinted, of course, at my name. Venus. The song was the only top-ten single Mom ever recorded.

I was born not quite nine months after the wedding.

So I was probably conceived at Cameron Hall.

That was the closest any Arinelli had come to being a pioneer.

I started picking out songs on the piano when I was two. By the time I turned three I could—with Pop’s excited coaching—struggle through one or two simple little concertos. I couldn’t recall a time when I didn’t play the piano. Pop never forced music on me, though. I was addicted to it, and when I was alone in our music room I practiced at my gleaming black Steinway and chatted happily with Gib, who posed in Mom and Pop’s wedding photo atop the baby grand in a silver frame.

I practiced piano for several hours each day and had lessons three times a week with the famous concert pianist Madame Le Ong; it was an enormous honor for her to accept me as a student. She called the wedding photograph a distraction but Pop let me keep it on the piano anyway.

In it Gib was a handsome, solemn, dark-haired boy, about five years old. He perched at the top of stone steps that led up to the Cameron chapel. The chapel sat atop a small hill covered in grass. Ivy graced its stone walls and flowers vined across the carved beams of its porch. Sunlight gleamed on the copper bell cupola. Enormous round mountains jutted up in the background.

His family—a much older brother and the brother’s wife, two baby sisters, and two peculiar-looking middle-aged aunts—posed around him. But Mom and Pop stood in the center of the small group in front of the chapel’s doors.

Mom wore a pale minidress and carried a bouquet of wildflowers; her hair was set in its perfect flipped-up style. Pop was the handsomest man in the world, tall and straight, his black hair gleaming.

In his dress shirt and crisp dark trousers, Gib looked equally handsome. He had one arm draped over a big, light-eyed dog with a large, jaunty bow tied around its neck. Since
the picture was in black and white, I had no idea of Gib’s hair or eye color, or the color of the dog. I wondered endlessly what Gib thought of Shari Kirk and Max Arinelli, a perky pop-song singer and her exotic-looking bandleader, who had suddenly decided to marry when they visited his home.

“Someday, when I take you to meet the Camerons, you’ll see how pretty their valley in the mountains is,” Mom told me every time she recited the wedding story. “It’s the most beautiful place in the world. It’s magical. It worked magic on your daddy. And on me. And the magic created
you
. An angel put you under my heart the very first night. Right there in the middle of the Tennessee mountains. She followed the light of the evening star and glided right down into the Camerons’ big house and gave you to your dad and me.”

“With a whole bunch of Camerons watching?” I’d always ask, because it made Mom laugh, and nod.

“I want you to have something very special,” Mom said on my sixth birthday. “Gib Cameron gave it to me when your daddy and I got married. It’s a piece of a star. It’s your namesake. It fell into a beautiful pond of magic water, and Gib found it there.”

She handed me a walnut-sized chunk of white quartz from her jewelry box. “He told me I could wish on the evening star and it would hear me, because I was taking care of one of its babies.” She held out the rock. “I wished for a baby of my own, and I got you.”

“How’d he know that would happen?” I blurted.

“I think he knew you’d be his friend,” Mom said solemnly. “I have to tell you something sad about him now that you’re old enough to understand. Not long before your dad and I went to Gib’s home and got married, Gib’s parents passed away.”

“He’s got no mom and pop?”

“That’s right, sweetie. They passed away.”

I was given to Pop’s pragmatism, even at six. In Mom’s
gentle world people
passed away
. In Pop’s brutally realistic world they
died
, usually in some gruesome way that Pop blamed on The System. “Did the gov’ment kill Gib’s mom and pop,
too?”
I asked urgently.

“Oh, no, sweetie, where’d you get that idea … No, I promise you the government does not make people pass away on purpose.”

“But Pop says the gov’ment killed Grandmother Akiko. He said her heart was broke by gov’ment bastards.”

“Don’t say ‘bastards,’ sweetie. I know you got that from your daddy, but he’s allowed to say bad words. He’s grown up. He learned to speak that way before he was old enough to know better.”

“But what happened to Gib’s mom and pop? I have to know. I just have to. I bet Pop knows.”

Which meant I’d ask him if she didn’t tell me. She knew I would. Mom sighed. “They didn’t pass away near here. They passed away in a hotel in England. All the way across an ocean. Far, far away. When Gib was only about five years old.”

“I used to be five!”

“It has nothing to do with being five,” Mom said frantically. I made strange leaps of logic, much like Pop when he talked politics. “It had to do with England, so you don’t have a thing to worry about.”

Mom always assumed I wouldn’t fear anything if she said it only happened to people outside our own geographic boundaries. Boogeymen, closet monsters, and other assorted childhood devils all lived in Russia, for example. She was a child of the Cold War, afraid of Russians like everyone else back then. I’m sure Pop’s leftist political leanings scared her, too. I expect she worried that some fanatical ideology might slither across the Ukraine in Pop’s vulnerable direction.

“England,” she repeated soothingly.

“What killed Gib’s parents in England?” I persisted.

She gave up on diplomacy, at that point. “Some bad men set a bomb in a hotel where Gib’s parents were staying. They happened to be in the hotel when the bomb blew up.”

“And they got blowed up, too? In big pieces?”

Even now I vividly recall Mom’s amazed expression. “You’ll have scary dreams if you think like that, sweetie. Little girls don’t want to hear about people getting, uhmmm, passing away.”

“Pop says—”

“Yes, all right, they were blown up. But the bad men who did it won’t ever come here and blow up anyone we know.”

“The bad men live in Russia?”

“No. They live in Ireland.”

“Did the police arrest ’em?”

“No, the police never found the bad men. But the bad men live in Ireland and don’t like to travel. I promise.”

“I bet Gib will go find ’em. And kill ’em. I bet he will.”

“No, he was only your age when his mommie and daddy passed away—”

“Got blowed all up.”

“Went to England.”

“He’ll get ’em. The bad men. I bet.”

She heaved an exhausted sigh. “My whole point is that now you understand why Gib is lonely, and why he needs a friend like you. And I hope you’ll always be friends with him. We’re going to visit him someday, as soon as your dad has time for a vacation.”

I was hooked. He’d given my mother a magic rock that brought me into the world. He’d even given her the idea for my odd name.

My sympathy for his orphanhood, my romantic imagination, and my little-girl conviction that every little boy is secretly enamored of her combined to convince me that he belonged to me.

It helped that from the time I was born he’d sent me birthday cards and Christmas cards. He actually addressed them
and signed them, in what could only have been his boyish, thick scrawl.

Mom addressed birthday cards and Christmas cards to Gib for me in return, and I signed them as carefully as he signed his name for me. “VENUS LIKE THE STAR,” I always wrote in large, merry letters. Mom would write out what I wanted to say, and I would copy it. One year I added a tender, heartfelt postscript.

“THE BAD MEN CAN’T GET US IF WE STAY PUT.”

The world was a very cruel and unfair place, Pop said. We Arinellis truly were odd fruit, and we were also forgotten fruit. We’d flowered on vines that were never meant to entwine. Music was the one thing that linked us to every branch of our strange ancestry. Every one of my four long-dead grandparents had been a musician of some sort.

Our paternal grandfather, Paolo Arinelli, had arrived in New York from Italy as an orphan sometime around 1910. He became a pianist and orchestra leader. An inborn talent for music was all he could afford to take with him from the old country.

From his handsome pictures and Pop’s proud memories of him, my grandfather leaped out, larger than life, always in formal attire with his black hair slicked back perfectly, a music baton in his hand and a rakish smile on his lips, chasing women, drinking illegal liquor, making glorious music for glorious people.

He met our grandmother in New York at a performance of a Japanese cultural troupe sponsored by the Japanese embassy.

Akiko Nakado was the daughter of a prominent and very traditional Tokyo clan descended from a samurai. Dressed in an elaborate kimono, she knelt in front of a long, stringed koto, playing the traditional instrument with filmy finger picks, the music sounding like raindrops on a timpani; judging by her pictures she was as lovely as a silk-screen painting
and as perfect as a haiku. She was only sixteen years old, and Paolo was thirty-five.

When she ran away with him to California her family in Tokyo held a ritual ceremony. They declared her dead.