Bitter Truth (6 page)

9

H
E FIRST SAW her at a place on Sixteenth Street, a dark, aggressively hip bar with a depressed jukebox and serious drinkers. She was sitting alone, dressed in black, not like an artiste, more like a mourner. She was sort of pretty, but not really thin enough, not really young enough, and he wouldn’t have given her a second look except that there was about this woman in black an aura of sadness that bespoke need. Need was about right, he figured, since he was looking for an effortless piece and need often translated into willing cession. He sat down beside her and bought her a drink. Her name, she said, was Jacqueline Shaw.

“She was drinking Martinis,” said Grimes, “which I thought was sexy in a dissolute sort of way.”

“Is this going to be just another lost girl story?” I asked. “Because if that’s all…”

“Shut up and listen,” said Grimes. “You might just learn something.”

After the second drink she started talking about her spiritual quest, how she was seeking a wider understanding of life than that allowed by the five basic senses. He smiled at her revelations, not out of any true interest, but only because he knew that spiritual yearning and sexual freedom were often deliciously entwined. She talked about the voices of the soul and the spirits that speak within each of us and how we need to learn to hear like a child once again to discern what the voices are whispering to us about the ineffable. She spoke of the connectedness of all things and how each of us, in our myriad of guises, was merely a manifestation of the whole. She said she had found her spiritual guide, a woman named Oleanna. Two more drinks and she and Grimes were walking side by side west, toward Rittenhouse Square. She had a place in one of those old apartment buildings on the south side of the park and was taking him there to show him her collection of spiritual artifacts, in which he had feigned interest.

“Ba-da-boom, ba-da-bing,” I said.

“And it was something, too,” said Grimes, “but that’s not what really grabbed my interest.”

“No?”

“It was that place, man, that place.”

Her apartment was unbelievably spacious, baronial in size and furnishings, with everything outsized and thick, huge couches, huge wing chairs, a grand piano. There were tapestries everywhere, on the walls, draped over tables, and chandeliers dripping glass, and carpets thick as fairway rough piled one atop the other. Plants in sculpted pots were everywhere, plants with wide veined leaves and plants with bright tiny flowers and hairy phallic plants thick with thorns. It was otherworldly, that place. She put on this music which drifted out from behind the furnishings, a magical white mix of wind harps and fish flutes, drone tubes and moon lutes and water bells. And then in the center of the main room, atop hand-woven Persian rugs in deep blue, beside a fire, she showed him her crystals and sacred beads and fetishes imported from Africa, a man with a lion’s head, a pregnant woman with hooves and beard, a child with a hyena’s grin. She lit a stick of incense and a candle and then another candle and then twenty candles more and with the fire and totems surrounding them they made love and it was as though the power of those tiny statues and the beads and the crystals were funneled by the music, the incense, the flame, right through her body and she collapsed again and again beneath him on the carpet. And he felt the power too, but the power he felt was not of the fire or of the stones or of the fetishes, it was the power of all the wealth in that magical room, the utter power of money.

“Suddenly,” said Grimes, “I developed a deep belief in the healing power of crystals.”

He went with her the next week to a meeting of her spiritual group. They met in what they called the Haven, which was really the basement of some rat trap in Mount Airy. Everybody was dressed in robes, orange or green, and sat on the floor. There was enough potpourri scattered to make Martha Stewart choke and they chanted and meditated and told each other of painful moments in their lives and their efforts to transcend their physical selves. He noticed that the church members bustled about Jackie like she was a source of some sort. Extra time was devoted to her, extra efforts taken to make her comfortable. “Do you need a pad, Jackie?” “Can we get you something to drink, Jackie?” “Would you like an extra dose of aroma therapy, Jackie?” A woman came out at the end of the meeting and sat on a high-backed regal chair, a beautiful woman in flowing white robes. Jacqueline was taken to sit directly at her feet. This woman was Oleanna, and as she sat on that chair she fell into a trance and strange noises emerged from her throat, noises which bent Jackie double with rapture. Grimes didn’t understand it, thought it part con, part insane, but he couldn’t help noticing how the members all buzzed about Jacqueline like bees about the queen. The next morning he hired an investigator to check her out discreetly.

Three months later, in a private ceremony in her apartment, with the music and the fetishes and the candles, with a pile of crystals between their kneeling, naked bodies, he asked her to marry him and she said yes. By that time the investigator had told him who her great-grandfather was and the approximate amount of the fortune she was scheduled to inherit.

“I’m not going to tell you what corporation they started or anything,” said Grimes.

“Would I know it?” I asked.

“Of course you would, everyone does. You’ve been eating its stuff forever. And her share of the fortune alone was over a hundred million. Do you know how many zeros that is? Eight zeros. That’s enough to buy a baseball team, that’s enough to buy the Eagles. And she said yes.”

“Jesus, you hit the big time.”

“Bigger than you’ll ever see, Mack, that’s for sure.”

With their future settled, Jackie took him one afternoon to meet her family in the ancestral mansion deep in the Main Line, a place they called Veritas. The house was a strange gothic castle, high on a grassy hill, surrounded by acres of woods and strange, desolate gardens. Inside it was a dank mausoleum, cold and humid, decorated much like Jacqueline’s apartment only on a larger, more decrepit scale. One brother never rose from his chair, wearing a creepy smoking jacket, almost too drunk to talk. His wife flitted about him like a hyperactive moth, refreshing his drink, fluffing his pillow. Another brother, thin and nervous, was in a den glued to his computer screen, watching the prices of the family’s vast holdings rise and fall and rise again on the nation’s stock exchanges. The sister was a sarcastic little bitch in black leather who laughed in his face when he told her he was a dentist and who cut Grimes with a series of scathing comments. The mother was overseas somewhere, vacationing alone, and the father stayed in his private upstairs chamber, never stepping down to meet his daughter’s fiancé.

“It felt like I was visiting the Munsters,” said Grimes. “And that was before Jacqueline took me to meet her Grammy, the daughter of the man who had founded the family fortune.”

Grandmother Shaw was hunched over in a chair, her wrinkled face tilted as if one half were made of wax and had been pressed too close to a flame. Her hands were bony and long, the rasp of her breathing sliced the silence in the room. The eye on the melted half of her face was closed; from the other a pale, cataractal blue peered out. She stared at him like he was a disease as Jacqueline made the introductions. Then, with a withering smile, the grandmother insisted on taking Grimes for a little walk around the gardens.

They were alone, the two of them, except for the old gardener who held onto her arm as she walked. It was the height of the summer now and the gardens were a riot of colors and scents. She showed him her rhododendron, her hyacinths, with spikes of red flowers, her blood-red chrysanthemums. Thick yellow bees burrowed for pollen, rubbing their setaceous bodies over the open blooms in a silent ecstasy. She led him through an arch cut into a high wall of spinous hedges. Here the hedgerows were trimmed into some sort of a maze, flowers fronting tall walls of barberry bristling with thorns, barberry hiding paths of primrose and blue lobelia that spun around in circles, leading to still more barberry. She asked him about himself as they walked, listening without comment. Her cane was gnarled. The old gardener, holding her arm as he walked beside her, was silent beneath his wide straw hat. They wove slowly past bunches of phlox and violet sage, past peals of bellshaped digitalis, alongside spiny rows of purple globe thistle.

“You some sort of gardener?” I asked Grimes.

“Everyone needs a hobby, what of it?”

“Just asking is all.”

They walked in a seemingly directionless path in that maze until they found themselves in the center of a very formal space scribed by tall circular hedges, edged with astilbe and gay-feather and gaudy red hollyhock on tall, reedy spires. In the center of the space was an oval of rich, dark earth, out of which bloomed bunches of gorgeous violet irises above a sea of pale yellow jewelweed. At one end of the oval was a statue of a naked woman reaching up to the heavens, her delicate bare feet resting on a huge marble base, studded with pillars, encrusted with brass medallions, the word “SHAW” engraved deep into the stone. Across the oval garden from the statue was a marble bench, situated under a white wooden arch infested with giant orange trumpet flowers, their stamens red as tongues. The gardener deposited the old woman on the bench and she bade Grimes to sit beside her with two pats of the marble. As they sat together the gardener took out a pair of shears and began to trim the foliage behind them with shivery little clips of the blades.

“This is our favorite place in all the world,” rasped Grandmother Shaw.

“It is beautiful,” said Grimes.

“We come here every day, no matter the weather. We feel all the power of the land in this place. We used to come here as children, too, but it has developed more meaning for us as we’ve grown older and more doddering. Mr. Shaw’s ashes are in an urn beneath the statue of Aphrodite. More treasures are buried in this earth, keepsakes, mementos of a better time. Everything of value we place here. We come every day and think of him and them and replenish ourselves with all the power in this dark, rich earth.”

“Your husband must have been quite a man,” he said.

“He was, yes,” she said. “In the last days of his life he had become intensely spiritual in a way open only to the scathed. You intend to marry our Jacqueline.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“We take our marriage vows very seriously in this family. When we promise to marry it is for forever.”

“I love Jacqueline very much. Forever is too short a time to be with her.”

“We are sure you felt that for your present wife too,” she said.

She was referring, of course, to Grimes’s wife of seven years, mother of his two children, keeper of his house, rememberer of his family’s birthdays and anniversaries, planner of the family vacations, his wife, about whom he hadn’t yet gotten around to telling Jacqueline. They had been childhood sweethearts, he and his wife, had dated all through high school, her parents had put him through dental school by mortgaging their house. It had been the shock of her life when he moved out to live with Jacqueline Shaw.

“That marriage was a mistake. I didn’t know what love was until I met your granddaughter.”

“Yes, great wealth has that effect on people. Your private investigator did tell you the value of our family’s holdings, didn’t he?”

“I love Jacqueline,” he said, rising from the bench with evident indignation. “And if you’re implying that my intentions are…”

“Sit down, Mr. Grimes,” she said, staring up at him with that opaque blue eye. “We need no histrionics between us. We were very impressed with the hiring of your investigator. It shows an initiative all too rare in this family. Sit down and don’t presume to understand our intentions here.”

He stared at her for a moment, but half her face smiled at him as she patted the bench once again, and so he sat. The gardener grunted and kneeled behind them, searching on his hands and knees for the tiniest weeds poking through the rich black mulch.

“Those purple spikes over there are from our favorite plant in this garden.
Dictamnus albus
. The gas plant. On windless summer evenings, if you put a match to its blossoms, the vapor of the flowers will burn ever so faintly, as if the spirits buried in this earth are igniting through its fragrant blooms. Jacqueline has always been a morose little girl, she had the melancholia from the start. Whether you marry her for her sadness or her money is no concern of ours.”

He began to object but she raised her hand and silenced him.

“We are simply grateful she has found someone to care for her no matter what tragedies will inevitably befall her. But we want you to understand what it means to be a member of our family before it is too late for you.”

“I can imagine,” he said.

“No, I don’t think so. It is beyond your imagining.”

The gardener grunted as he stood once more and began again with the shears.

“Our blood is bad, Mr. Grimes, weak, it has been defiled. Where there was strength in my father there is only decay now. My sister died of bad blood, my son has been ruined by it. The result is the weakness evident in my grandchildren. If you marry Jacqueline you must never have children. To do so would be to court disaster. You must join us in refusing to allow the weaknesses in our family’s gene pool to survive. Let it die, let it fade away. We are different from those pathetic others who try so futilely to keep alive a malignant genetic line at all costs. All that’s left of our physical bodies is rot. Everything of value has already been transferred to the wealth.”

The old lady sighed and turned her head away.

“Our wealth has been hard earned, Mr. Grimes, earned with blood and bone, more pain than you could ever know. But whatever remains of my father and his progeny, and of my husband too, still lives in the corpus of our family’s holdings, their hearts still beat, their souls still flourish through the tentacles of our wealth. Everything we have done in what was left to us of our lives was to honor their sacrifice and to maintain the body of their existence towards three divine purposes. Conciliation, expiation, redemption.”