Ken Kuhlken_Hickey Family Mystery 02 (11 page)

Juliet is a goner the first time a Capulet kicks a Montague in the shins. Oedipus’ daddy gives him to the trashman. Hamlet, pushed over the edge by Uncle Claude. Orphan Annie, Saint Joan, Tess Durbeyfield, Cynthia Tucker. All of them doomed from birth. Spare the poor children, Holy Father.

Daddy says our ruin started with two pretty girls tying ribbons into their hair. Venus, the nine-year-old, wore a silver ribbon, a rosy dress, and a round silver pendant studded with a triple cross of tiny chips of ruby. Her sister Ophelia had a red ribbon, a yellow dress, and hair of gold mixed with auburn. People called her the most beautiful child in Dublin. She looked like me. I wish I could have seen pictures, but the day the mailman delivered them after Grandmother and Grandfather drowned in a shipwreck, she made Daddy build a bonfire, and she cooked them in front of the Bitch and me.

“Give me the silver bow,” Ophelia commanded like spoiled children do. “If you will, I’ll be good and I’ll give you my tart.”

“You will give me your tart,” Venus said, “because Papa will give you another.”

“Yes, he will. Please tie the bow in my hair.”

Venus didn’t care for ribbons or bows. A girl her age wanted jewelry. Still it was a good deed, she thought. She tied the silver ribbon into Ophelia’s hair.

My grandmother stood downstairs welcoming guests to her party, a chance for the Enlightened to meet their prophetess, Madame T. The guests were dizzy with joy and fervor. The nitwits believed Theosophy could save them from poverty and war. The true esoteric faith would unite us because all religions flow from the same spring, the primal revelation given to us at the Golden Dawn of history. The great religions are hardly more than parodies of the ancient Secret Doctrine revealed to Madame B by the Tibetan masters, whose Truth will lead us forward to the golden age when the feminine, nurturing yin again reigns equally, alongside the tempestuous yang, blah blah.

My grandmother had flaxen hair and china skin, Venus told me. She covered her bosoms in lace, so men would look hard, trying to steal a peek at her luscious flesh. She was flirty like Venus and the Bitch, nothing like me, and kissed all the men with their top hats and red noses but only shook hands with the snippy wives. As she beckoned to her daughters, they scampered from their lookout atop the stairs, where they squirmed in starched pantaloons and petticoats, itching for the nasty old madame to show up so they could hurry outside and quit acting civilized. They curtsied and preened for “Dublin’s most astute minds,” the snooty professors, artists dressed like chimney sweeps, harried Catholic mothers with children dangling from every limb, then they ran upstairs and made ugly faces at each other, while Katy the maid shooed the guests’ brats out back to play and Grandmother walked the guests into the parlor where my grandfather offered them dark bread, Danish cheeses, and Spanish wine. Grandfather was a young colonel in the militia, given to black moods, a Celt by ancestry and disposition. The day she got hypnotized, Venus told Miss V that Grandfather looked like somebody who would slice little Nell up the middle with a buzz saw.

Back at their perch overlooking the foyer, with Grandmother gone, Ophelia climbed onto the banister, pushed off, and flew down, holding the rail only with her thighs. Venus stood chafing with jealousy that Ophelia could do with impunity what she was not allowed. When Ophelia ran back onto the landing, Venus commanded, “You shall not exhibit your petticoats and bare legs.”

“My petticoats are clean and pretty,” Ophelia snapped, “and my legs are not bare above the knees.”

As her sister ran back to the landing, Venus thought of later in the day when Grandmother would order her to play piano while Ophelia sang. The guests would rave for the little one. Godmother Callahan would call Ophelia the loveliest, a child for the golden age, like the crones at Otherworld used to call me. Oh, the other girls got so furious they dreamed of watching me bounce down the cliffs and scatter like moon dust into the sea. Still, Father, everywhere I go, jealous females hate me, the men want to devour me, I haven’t been out of danger since I left the mission.

Madame T’s carriage arrived, and Grandmother, arm in arm with Godmother Callahan, rushed out from the library to meet the great personage at the door. Naughty Ophelia had already climbed the railing, over the knob onto the downgrade, where she giggled and pointed at the doorway, at Grandmother and Mrs. Callahan practicing their poses and rehearsing the lines they’d use to greet their Deva. Looking back at her sister, naughty Ophelia tittered, “I will slide into the madame’s fat arms.”

“You won’t,” Venus yelped, and grabbed for her sister, who ducked just beyond her reach. “Father will give us the whip if you do.”

“Not to me. Father will not punish me.”

“You would betray me after I gave you the ribbon?”

“Yes,” Ophelia cried.

The rest I saw in a dream Saint Ophelia sent me. In Venus’ story, the lie she even told when Miss V hypnotized her, she only lunged for the silver ribbon, to pluck it out of her sister’s hair. But truly Venus pushed her.

Ophelia threw up her hands to balance herself. Her thighs in the slippery petticoats and pantaloons couldn’t hold their tight grip. Swooping down the banister Katy had waxed that very morning, Ophelia hollered for her mama and shrieked as she hit the knob that probably smashed her pubic bone and tipped her forward so that as she sailed off the inclined end of the railing she soared headfirst across the foyer. Her arms shot out. One of them shattered a window. The other socked Mrs. Callahan in the neck, at the very same moment Ophelia’s skull bashed against the door molding.

Before she had to gobble any poison fruit and learn to secure the buttons over her heart and hide her pantaloons, lucky Ophelia died.

I got this out of a pamphlet Madame A sent all over the world.

The grounds of Otherworld, inspired by the gardens of Tivoli, Fontainebleau, and shrines in Japan and India, were sculptured to touch the most ravenous heart with peace. There are seven main buildings. A pagoda, used for our rites-of-passage ceremonies. A Greek temple, where our classrooms are located. Two Mediterranean villas overlooking the sea, which provide quarters for our married residents, their infants, and visitors. Our students, of every race and color from all corners of the world, are provided for in the adobe barracks halls.

People of all ages thrive at Otherworld, in a balance achieved by spiritual, intellectual, artistic, and physical pursuits. The gardens sustain us and allow us the blessing of healthy labor. The mulberry orchard feeds our silkworms. The girls weave fabric, the women tailor our garments. In service to each other and all humanity, no one at Otherworld feels useless. Every soul is vital here.

It is the children who sanctify Otherworld. Sent here to be raised in light and goodness, educated in our Raja Yoga school, uniquely dedicated to scholarship, creativity, and discipline, our students will forge the future as creators and governors of the Golden Age.

Hah! If I wrote the pamphlet, I would say, Come to Nitwit World, where everybody thinks she’s a star, where the food tastes like grass, the fog makes you sniffle, the abundant flowers make the whole place a beehive, where they work their Raja Yoga slaves from dawn to curfew at both hard labor and their studies, so to outsiders who might contribute they look like Spartan athletes and geniuses. Come to Otherworld, I would write, where Madame A will preach about the Ring Veda, symbolism of the lotus flower, the perfect imperfection of bamboo, or the transmigration of souls until you think you are smarter than Christ, instead of the nitwit you really are.

That is what I would write, Father, but to you I will confess the truth. Since we got banished, having spent two years at the mission, almost three more on the outside, if it were possible I would run back there and take Daddy with me, to live or die. To Daddy and me, Otherworld is still our palace in the stars. Even if she had spared Daddy, I would hate Venus always, for destroying Otherworld.

It began in 1912, when Grandfather exiled Venus from Dublin. Grandfather acted as if Venus were a stranger who’d foully murdered his precious, while she lay in her room weeping, trembling in a fever. Her skin grew rashed and her eyes got bilious yellow. Lucky for Venus, Madame T was there. Because she saw that Grandfather harbored no mercy, Madame T advised Grandmother to send Venus away until he could forgive her. Madame T would arrange everything. It would be like going to heaven, the madame promised, and Grandfather replied, “Heaven is not where she belongs.”

No one remembers what Grandmother said, but she let Madame T wire Madame A. She let Grandfather purchase two tickets on a passenger liner. Katy got two weeks to bid good-bye to her sisters and the fellows at the pub around the corner. Then she and the poor girl, wrapped in a quilt, who shivered with each draft and breeze, and stared in fright at everything, got put on a train. The next day they sailed out of London.

Hooray, hooray, Father, Venus survived, as the wicked most always do. The damned doctor probably still believes he is tops because he saved her, like the doc who cured Herr Hitler’s pleurisy. The only clear thinker was Grandfather, who would have buried her alive. When you murder somebody, you simply must die. Ten thousand years of civilization, still they let murderers bear children, and the poor, damned children have to pay. Doesn’t anybody read the Bible?

Daddy was thirty-two years old when the
Orpheus
docked in San Pedro. He and a Puerto Rican lady were waiting to take Venus from Katy the maid, who told Daddy the story I have written.

Daddy was raised in Silver City, New Mexico by a Baptist father and mother. He left home at sixteen, worked as a ranch hand, and discovered liquor, which swiftly drove Jesus away. In place of loving Jesus, Daddy told me, he chased after barmaids and wild señoritas. He stole about a hundred head of cattle before he got caught and condemned to a year and thirty days in the prison on Skull Mesa, where the brutes whipped and clobbered him with a rifle butt, yet Daddy is so brave he wouldn’t have told me except, all these years later, he still has the scars across the small of his back and beneath his right shoulder blade. After New Mexico, Daddy tried Oregon, where he lusted after a fancy Danish girl, robbed a payroll wagon, and got condemned once more.

In prison, Daddy swore off fancy women, began his studies to become a shyster, and launched his quest for the Way. After prison he trekked restlessly from one employment or teacher to the next, down the coast to Oakland, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, L.A., and into the study of scriptures and tracts on subjects from the Apocrypha to necromancy. Prison, his studies, the moral teaching of Madame T, and his devotion to Venus kept Daddy celibate for sixteen years. The day Venus ran off with the Fiend and Daddy got drunk for the first time in three decades, he told the Bitch and me that he should’ve wrapped a leather thong around his gonads until they dropped off like a steer’s.

“Beloved, you saw through him from the start. He truly is a fiend.…Every day the Fiend grows bolder. Soon I may die.”

While her soul and heart putrefied, Venus’ body flourished in the sunny gardens and sea breeze of Otherworld. At twelve years, already taller than puny average women, she compared to most beauties like a swan to a chicken. With her gift for the harp and piano, already the favorite of Madames A and T, she was Otherworld’s darling, as I would later be. Yet she made no friends besides the madames and Daddy. The children resented her privileges, her haughty ways, and the meanness that launched her into a fit or pout if another student earned more praise than she did. Besides, guilty people don’t ever let strangers get close, do they, Father?

But neither can they bear solitude. All day and evening, Venus dogged Madame A or Daddy. In the Raja Yoga school, where Daddy taught classics, history, and law, she would bring her work from other classes to finish while sitting beside him—a liberty nobody else got, not even me—then show it to him and bask in his praise.

One July morning in 1917, just before dawn, Daddy crept into Venus’ little room, woke her, beckoned her outside and to follow him across the central lawn where mystics knelt in sunrise prayers, into the sanctuary where Madame A lay on her feather bed underneath its silk netting. The Enlightened who crowded around her parted to let Daddy lead Venus by the shoulders to the bedside. Madame A’s giant head was propped on red silk pillows, hair looking just-brushed, skin damp and transparent blue. Her breath, which Daddy says was always minty sweet, smelled like hot tar. Each time the tiny, wrinkled eyelids blinked, a tear or two spilled out. Madame Esmé, standing beside her, wiped her Deva’s cheek with a hanky.

Daddy kept steadying Venus’ shoulders, even when Madame A motioned with her head for Venus to come nearer, and Venus leaned close to the bed, her ear a few inches from the face of Madame A, who whispered too soft and gravelly for her to understand. Madame Esmé knelt with her ear to Madame A’s lips.

Skinny, gaunt Madame Esmé, who had eyes like searchlights and icy fingers long before Venus killed her, whispered, “Yes, dear,” over and over. When at last she rose, she proclaimed in a raw monotone, as if she’d been kidnapped and the brutes held a gun to her temple, “The Aryan master whose initials are CCB has spoken through Madame A, confiding in us that our Venus’ soul, which once occupied the flesh of Saint Isabella, has been sent here on a mission, to lead us through a coming tribulation. The master requests that we honor Venus accordingly, and.…” She turned to Daddy and glared as if he had just yanked her cat’s tail. “Henry Tucker is to be her guardian.”

As Dr. Fontaine dispersed the crowd, Venus broke free of Daddy’s grip. She ran outside and dashed across the lawn to the cliff trail. Of course Daddy followed behind. Venus, wild as the ghost of Heathcliff’s Catherine, kept vanishing and appearing out of the fog. Hands out like a blind girl’s, she staggered along. About a hundred yards up the trail she gave a raucous laugh, spun around, and collapsed. Father, isn’t it obvious that Venus laughed because she had been handed a crown?

Of course Venus had always been seducing Daddy, but now she turned all three guns on him. With Madames T and A gone, and Daddy the only person who knew her shameful history, Venus would make him her slave.

The first time she visited his room after dark, she asked him to rehearse with her a scene from a Lashlee drama in which she would play Leda. Daddy read the lines of Zeus disguised as the swan. For an hour they sat on the floor, leaning against the bed, praising each other’s beauty. In one part, Venus would reach up and pet Daddy’s brow. By the time she kissed his cheek farewell and left, Daddy had caught fire so torridly that he lay squeezing his head in both hands and groaning until finally he got up and walked the cliff trail most of the night. He was a lusty man, Father, deprived for nearly twenty years—I bet you know how that feels.

One week Venus would snuggle against Daddy’s arm, lay her head on his shoulder, her hair damp and fragrant from bathing, or tiptoe up behind him while he worked at his desk in the school, reach around and caress his face. For days thereafter, on his every approach, she stiffened and talked icily as a good French girl addressing a German. While Daddy racked his brain trying to recall whether he had acted improperly, and reasoned that she was a troubled child who must be treated with utmost patience, she fattened her pride on his agony, and when she observed him regain his balance, she knocked him reeling again, sneaking up behind as he walked toward the pagoda, clasping her arms around him, squashing her tits into the small of his back. “Oh, Mr. Tucker,” she exclaimed. “I’ve grown so fond of the Chinese. I’ve begun
The Tale of Genji
. Don’t you think it’s a marvel?”

On foggy nights in May and June, after the winter sea currents had begun warming, Venus would go alone down the cliffs for a swim. Poor obsessed Daddy, from watching her so closely, knew everything she did except in her own little room. One night Daddy stood by the gazebo when he heard a scream. Believe me, Father, you would have to scream loud and shrill to be heard atop the cliff, at least two hundred feet, with the waves bashing the rocks and rumbling out again. I used to stand in that very cove, the water swirling around my hips and thighs, and bellow love songs as if Saint Ophelia had sent the Man but I had to lure him out of hiding.

Daddy sprinted down the trail and up the beach to the cove just below the gazebo, staring frantically into the purplish mist, his heart pounding so fast it felt like a steady whir. When he tripped over something, he discovered her clothes, rolled into a ball. “Venus!” he hollered. “Please, Venus!”

Through the fog he heard the breakers crashing thunderously in hundred-yard walls, the most treacherous kind. The surf frothed around his feet. He called out again. Still she didn’t answer. He kicked off his shoes and raced into the mist and waves. Before he reached waist deep she appeared.

She rose straight up as if surfacing from a dive. Her darkened cinnamon hair fell in ringlets over her shoulders. Her purplish flesh sparkled as if flecks of mica in the water had stuck to her. Daddy tried to stare at her eyes, which gazed sternly at him, but he couldn’t resist stealing glances at the hard, slim belly, the tits that quivered as though water were rippling over them, at the long legs, muscular from climbing and dancing. Finally, with a glimpse of her golden fleece, Daddy swooned, Father. When he told me so, he wept in shame. He had gone to save her, but all his blood swamped his head and he keeled over, plot, into the water. Venus had to drag him to shore.

She was dressed and standing over him. “Why would you betray me like this, Mr. Tucker?”

“I heard your scream.”

“I did
not
scream.”

“But…even so, I had no idea you were…”

“Naked. Oh, truly?
Liar!
I saw how you looked at me, as if we were creatures.”

Daddy lay there realizing that he could never look at her chastely again. “We
are
creatures,” he groaned.

With a scowl, Venus wheeled and strode away, while Daddy lay already wondering what kind of life he was going to make outside of Otherworld.

The very next day he confessed his transgression to Madame Esmé who, agreeing that he could no longer be trusted, assumed Venus’ guardianship. Daddy borrowed Madame’s car and scouted San Diego for an office from which he might practice. Days passed without his getting closer than across a room from Venus. Even in school, she sat in the rear, looked his way only rarely and then with a cruelly vacant stare, until the night she boldly entered his quarters.

She wore the rainbow-colored tunic Madame A had given her on her fourteenth birthday, but she had grown and fleshed out so in those months, it was snug as an evening gown, and the hem barely reached her knees. She was barefoot, and her damp hair was scented with lavender. On her way from the showers she had picked a white gardenia and arranged it into her hair.

“Mr. Tucker,” she whispered, “I’m going to speak the truth of my heart and hope you can forgive me.”

“I can,” Daddy said.

“A foul sickness has come over me, since the night.…Mr. Tucker, it’s horrid. I can’t for a moment forget the feeling that possessed me when you saw my…as if many hands were clutching my body at once, the fingers invading me with heat and bitter cold.…Henry…I wish to feel it again.” Suddenly she grasped the hem of her gown and flung it upward, tearing a seam and knocking the gardenia from her hair. She stooped to pick up the flower, replaced it, and tiptoed to within a yard of Daddy, her eyes boring into his heart.

Father, imagine me standing before you wearing nothing but a white flower and glowing with the heat that fills a girl when she’s adored. Venus was almost as exquisite. Imagine me inching ever closer until my belly is so near that you can see the downy hairs and watch the skin flex every time you breathe on it. Who could help but reach around, cup my rear in his hands, and guide me even closer? If I quivered and fell limp in your hands as though asking you to possess me, uttering little gasps and moans, wouldn’t you lift me onto the bed?

Daddy wouldn’t tell me the rest, but I know what she did. I know Venus. With arms, hips, legs, and filthy lies she drew him closer and closer until she had lured him inside. Once she got him there, she wept, called him a beast and pounded on his back, but whenever he tried to release her, she wouldn’t let go.

Venus slept beside poor Daddy, who lay all night gazing in awe, dedicating his heart and will to her happiness—he might as well have been ordering his coffin.

It is clear, isn’t it, Father—Daddy was Venus’ guardian angel the same as Ophelia is mine. Daddy came to save her from hell and she killed him, she and her henchwoman the Bitch, because he betrayed her over me. He wouldn’t let them kill his true darling.