When Venus Fell (39 page)

“Min said, ‘That man looks like he’s got some Indian blood.’

“Bea said, ‘No, he looks something like a Chinaman.’ Bea’s word, not mine. Aunt Olivia thought he was Hawaiian. ‘Maybe Korean,’ Simon put in. ‘Like Dr. Su, Dad’s friend at Oak Ridge.’

“It was almost funny. There we were hiding behind the curtains with Min taking photographs and Bea and Olivia debating a stranger’s bloodline like he was a prize bull. And I remember thinking when you dig a deep hole, people say you’ll dig all the way to China. That maybe the man had popped through a hole.

“Aunt Olivia started gesturing toward the front doors. Bea jumped. ‘Herself is right! What are we doing? We’re standing here gawking like forest brownies watching dew fall!’

“When your folks stepped inside the front hall your dad looked around like somebody might be waiting to jump him. But your mother clapped her hands, and smiled and said, ‘Oh, Max. It’s a different world,’ and then she noticed me. I had hidden and was sneaking peeks from just inside the library doors. Of course Isabel and Ruth gave me away—Isabel was making baby-babble noises and drooling down the front of my shoulder, because I had her in a knapsack on my back. I had one hand wound in the shoulder strap of Ruth’s overalls so she wouldn’t run back to the fresh flowers in a vase by the hall coat stand. She’d already eaten the blooms off some tea roses.

“About the time your mother noticed me, Ruth stamped one of her hard little bare heels onto my toes. I think I went
oooph
or something, but I kept a straight face.

“Your mother hurried over and dropped down in front of me. She took off her sunglasses and looked into my face, and smiled. ‘You’re covered in baby girls,’ she said. ‘And I’d say you’re doing a good job taking care of them.’

“I was only five years old, but I already appreciated a pretty woman when I saw one. I told her, ‘I look after the ladies around here, ma’am.’

“She was too sweet to laugh at me. Your father came over to me and held out his hand and said, ‘Glad to meet you, you must be the ladies’ man around here.’

“I was too little to get the joke, but I said, ‘Yessir, can’t keep ’em off of me,’ and he smiled—and your mother burst out laughing then. He and I shook hands. That was the first time a grown man ever offered me his hand. It meant a lot to me.

“You see, I do have distinct memories of him, Nellie—good memories. I studied newspaper pictures of him when I started looking for you and Ella. I noticed the small scars on
his chin and his eyebrows and the one across the top edge of his lip. I noticed his broken nose.

“He’d had a helluva hard life as a kid. I know that explains a lot about him. How he turned out. His politics. I try to remember that when I make judgments about him.

“But when I was little I didn’t know he’d been beaten half to death in gang fights when he was growing up after World War Two. I just thought he looked different.

“He asked me if I had time to escort your mother around over the weekend, because he had work to do. And I told him I had plenty of time for an extra girl.

“He shook my hand again. And your mother didn’t laugh at me. She said she’d be honored.

“That was the best day I’d had in months.”

“We couldn’t treat your folks like customers—we weren’t clear on that aspect of running an inn yet. They were a test—they were the first paying visitors. They were the only guests in the house.

“At supper Bea set them at the big dining room by themselves but it seemed—well, too fussy and too lonely for two people. All that china and crystal and a table big enough for twenty. Bea asked them if they’d like to join the family and they looked kind of relieved and said yes. So there they were the first night, in our little Formica dining room of the family wing.

“FeeMolly overwhelmed your folks with all the food she rolled out. We still have the menu in a scrapbook Aunt Olivia keeps. Quail casserole and all sorts of homegrown vegetables, homemade yeast rolls and pies and cakes—not to mention the best wine in the house. Your dad said we couldn’t go on treating strangers this well or we’d go broke. Your mother said the brochure told the truth. That we made them feel like family. She said neither one of them had any family, and I remembered being sort of embarrassed for them. Aunt Olivia
wrote on the table with a pen:
You’re our good-luck charm. So we’ll dub you honorary family
.

“I think that pleased them no end. I think that was when your dad began to relax a little.

“After dinner he played the piano and your mother sang for us in the library of the main rooms. All sorts of songs, our own private show—your dad on the piano and your mother singing. This went on for hours. We all loved it. I sat on the floor with one arm around Shep—he was one of Bea’s imported sheepdogs—and the other clutching Isabel, and I didn’t want that night to ever end.

“They were magic, your folks.

“The next morning your mother got up early and she asked me if I’d show her around—go walking with her. She wanted to come down here to the hot springs. Your dad was working on musical arrangements. I was so proud that your mother thought I was man enough to escort her around the valley. This was important to me. But I told her I had to take my baby sisters, too. Simon had put me in charge of them.

“She said she’d be glad to help me baby-sit. It was clear she loved children. So off we went. I hoped the mailman or the sheriff would drive up and see us. I wanted to show her off. She was dressed in a yellow bathing suit, with an open white shirt over it, and white shorts, and white sandals. Her toenails and fingernails were painted bright pink. She put a broad yellow sunhat on her hair and tied it beneath her chin. We have a picture of her.

“Anyhow—we set off down the road, your mother pushing Isabel in her stroller and me pulling Ruth in a toy wagon. It was a nasty-hot day for September, and the trees didn’t shade the spring quite as much as they do now. But when we got down there your mother shucked her shorts and sat down in the water. I didn’t understand why she wanted to sit in warm water on a hot day. I’d never heard of a hot tub. Maybe she hadn’t either, in nineteen sixty-eight.

“I had on shorts and a T-shirt so I sat like this with my
feet in the water, with Isabel asleep in her stroller and Ruthie splashing around in the shallow edge.

“I asked your mother why she and her husband didn’t have any kids, since she liked kids so much. I remember she said something about wanting babies worse than anything else in the world. I didn’t understand why she didn’t have any if she wanted them so much. I thought she might be like Min’s Aunt Beebee. Now Beebee—at least this was the way I heard it when I was little—Beebee couldn’t have babies because she kept looking under the wrong cabbages in her cabbage patch. Also known as barking up the wrong tree, in terms of the husbands Beebee picked out.

“I said that to your mother—the cabbages theory—and she laughed. I remember that. Then she got quiet and said she’d look under all the cabbages in her garden if she got the chance. That she would love to have babies.

“That’s when I gave her a rock.

“I always carried some of my wishing rocks in my pocket, rubbing them like worry stones or fetishes. I told her my mother said they were pieces of the evening star, and that it was good luck to wish on the evening star, but that she’d have to come down here at dark and wait until she saw the star in the water, and then wish. Your mother asked me, How does the star make a reflection if there are trees overhead?

“I’d wondered about this technical point myself, but my mother had always explained it away—you had to trust that the reflection was there. That the evening star would make your wish come true when the time was right. That was the trick. Timing.

“I told your mother that was why some of my wishes never came true. I just couldn’t get the timing right. She asked me what I wished for the most. A toy, a trip to Disneyland, what?

“I told her I wished my parents weren’t dead.

“Your mother started crying. At the time I had no idea how a child saying something like that would upset someone
with a soft heart. So she was crying, and I was embarrassed and confused.

“Then all of a sudden she said she felt too hot, and she started to get out of the water, but she didn’t make it. She fainted.

“Just went limp. Slid down in the deep center here. I grabbed her under the arms. I wasn’t strong enough to pull her out of the spring, and I couldn’t let go or she’d drown. So I only managed to keep her head above water. Ruth looked like she might fall in the deep part at any second, and I’m thinking,
What do I do if Ruth falls in, too?

“I started yelling for help. Shep always watched Ruthie like she was a lamb, so he decided that Ruthie was the reason I was yelling, and he took hold of her by the back of her sundress and pulled her out of the water’s edge.

“Ruthie never liked being herded like mutton on the hoof, so she pitched a fit. I’m yelling at the top of my lungs, Ruthie’s screeching, Shep starts barking—and all that time I’m desperately trying to hold your mother’s head above water with my arms going numb.

“It must have been only a few minutes but it felt like hours. Suddenly your father ran down the road. He’d started after us the way he said he would, and then heard the commotion. So he comes running full tilt and jumps in the spring. He gets one arm around your mother and one around me, and he pulls us both out.

“Then he starts rocking your mother in his arms and shaking her a little, telling her to breathe, to wake up, and he looked like he was scared out of his mind. She came to and started crying again.

“He held her and kept rocking her—and he’s checking the pulse in her wrist, and he puts his hand over her heart, and he asks her ‘What’s wrong?’ about a dozen times.

“Finally she manages to say, ‘I’d die to have your babies.’

“And he looked stunned. He said, after a minute, ‘You know I love you and I wouldn’t have a life if you died.’

“I didn’t forget that. Words like that, with death still such a part of my thoughts every day—I remember that’s exactly what your parents said to each other. They kissed, and your dad looked over at me and put his arm around me. Your mother apologized for scaring me, and your dad told me I saved her life.

“I saved her life. I’d finally made a difference in the matter of life and death. I couldn’t do anything about my folks being killed, but I could protect other people. I never forgot how that felt, that day, realizing the power to overcome grief by serving others. The power to make sense of the world by stopping some of the senseless pain.”

“Your dad wouldn’t let your mother walk back to the Hall. He sent me to get Simon to bring a car down. When we all got back to the Hall your dad carried her upstairs.

“When your dad told the family what I’d done at the spring Simon went to the liquor cabinet and fixed me about a thimbleful of brandy, and he and Bea and Olivia drank a toast to me. I thought I’d burst with pride.

“Your folks came downstairs a little while later. They confessed to Bea and Aunt Olivia that they’d lied about being married. They asked if we’d let them hold a ceremony in the chapel that afternoon. I think your dad knew he’d almost lost your mother at the spring, and it made him take stock of how he felt about her.

“Aunt Olivia had Bea put the word out—and within a few hours we had a minister, and a photographer, and flowers, and even a wedding cake.

“Your dad played the wedding march on the chapel’s antique organ—but the sound was majestic. And afterward he played a song he and your mother had written, and your mother sang with it. Words she’d written that afternoon.

“And that song was ‘Evening Star.’ About my star. My wishing star. I will never in my life forget that song. We all
went out front of the chapel with your folks, for pictures. I sat on the steps with my arm around Shep. I remember thinking that we would be all right, now. That the evening star must be watching and listening again.

“The next afternoon, when your folks were getting ready to leave, they told Aunt Olivia they’d promote the Hall to everybody they knew. As it turned out, they mentioned their wedding to a reporter in the next city, and he wrote a feature article about the inn, and we got a lot of business from that. We got our start, because of your parents’ wedding here.

“Before she left your mother put her arms around me and told me she’d made a wish on the star, that she’d wished for a baby girl, and that if her wish came true she’d name her Venus after the evening star, and maybe one day her daughter would come here to look at herself in the spring. That way I’d get to see her. And she’d bring me good luck.

“She told me she’d come back to visit and she’d count on me to take care of her daughters the way I took care of my sisters, and the way I took care of her, when she fainted.

“I promised her—I swore to her on the wishing rock—that I would do that.

“Take care of her daughters.

“Take care of you.”

Take care of my daughters
, Mom had asked. She tried to make certain Ella and I would have a second family, at Cameron Hall. Gib had saved her life—and by extension, mine, too. I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him.

“What are you thinking?” Gib asked. “I didn’t tell you the story of that weekend to make you more unhappy. But you don’t look happy at all right now.”

Maintaining control was critical. Here was a man who was man enough to share a stunning, intimate story with undemanding sentiment in his eyes and his voice set in the earthy cadence of a parish priest reciting a workingman’s mass. I loved simplicity as much as I loved the complex elegance of music. Music was nothing without its silences.

I took a deep breath. “Thank you for telling me about it. I just need a second to recover. I’m sitting here where my mother almost drowned, and you’ve told me a story I never heard before. Pop never talked about it.”

“Does it help you understand that I
want
to remember your father kindly?” he asked. “That I’d like nothing better than to put aside what he did later on?”