Private Entrance (The Butterfly Trilogy) (28 page)

     When he was fifteen he read a book about Lucky Luciano. Even though the gangster hadn't been in Vegas in '46 but was hiding out in Cuba, young Michael fantasized that Luciano had snuck into the United States to be present at the Flamingo's grand opening and had stayed long enough to entertain a certain little waitress named Lucy Fallon before being caught by the Feds and deported back to Italy.

     Over the years, Fallon devoured every news report he could find on that auspicious casino opening. One reporter had even described it has having "the gaudy opulence of a top hoodlum's funeral," which was ironic considering Bugsy Siegel was assassinated seven months later when a gunman at the window of his Beverly Hills home shot him through the head with such accuracy the police found Bugsy's right eyeball fifteen feet away.

     And Bugsy's girlfriend, Virginia Hill, nicknamed by the FBI "a fabulous woman of mystery," had slept with every top Mafioso in the country before landing in Bugsy's bed. It was after Hill that the Flamingo was named—for her long legs that Siegel was so crazy about. She had chutzpah. In 1951, the Kefauver Committee was investigating rackets and fraud in Vegas and subpoenaed Hill to testify. When the distinguished politician asked her the secret of her success, she replied, "Senator, I'm the best goddamned cock-sucker in the world."

     Michael had kept a secret scrapbook filled with the news articles he had collected on gangsters, trying to figure out which one was his father. The latest, added only weeks ago, was the obituary of an old Vegas mobster, Carlo Bellagamba, who had been forced out of Nevada by the Feds back in 1970. He died of a heart attack in Chicago (in a whorehouse, it was rumored, trying to screw two women at once). Fallon had stared at the youthful photo of the deceased, taken from old police files, studying
the Italian features, looking for his own in them, silently asking:
Were you my father?

     The charge nurse greeted him warmly and escorted him down a corridor crowded with beds, wheelchairs, and old folks in varying stages of alertness.

     Michael had been trying for over fifty years to learn his mother's secret. Maybe this time she could be persuaded. After all, Lucy was seventy-eight and had recently moved into a nursing home because of a fall that had broken her hip. She needed daily medication and could only walk with the aid of a walker. Maybe the idea of being so close to facing her Maker would loosen her tongue. And the scrapbook would help. He would turn the pages and say, "Is this him? Is this the one?" Making it easier for her.

     She was in a private room, propped up against crisp pillows, a pink bed jacket around her thin shoulders. "Mikey!" she said in pleasant surprise. She looked at him with shining eyes. Her handsome son. Nearly sixty but so fit, so dark-haired.

     "Ma," he said quietly. "Who was my father? Tell me his name." If it was really bad—like Lucky Luciano—Michael would say she had been raped. But he needed the name to start his spin on it.

     Lucy pressed her lips together. She had never told him as a matter of her own personal pride. Couldn't he see that? She had thought he would drop the subject long ago. What did it matter who his father was? Lucy wanted to keep her dignity. As long as she never uttered the man's name, she kept her honor.

     "Mikey, listen to me. It won't change your life one iota. You've done well. You're rich. You have power. Leave me my one little bit of dignity,
please."

     Fallon recognized intransigence when he saw it and knew he would not be getting any information from her.

     The wedding was in three days. Too much was riding on it—Mike Fallon had wagered his entire life and fortune on those vows being spoken. He could not risk a slip of the tongue by his sentimental old mother. It didn't matter how much Francesca and Stephen might be in love, if the Vandenbergs should catch wind of scandal—the bride's grandfather a notorious gangster!—they would cancel the wedding and Stephen (Fallon knew
his
stripe well) would comply.

     Without even saying good-by, he left the room and ducked into a protected doorway to flip open his cell phone. He still had connections in Florida. It had to be done right away. He didn't care about the details—the hit man could disguise himself as a visitor or a doctor, and he could use a pillow or lethal drugs—all Michael cared about was that it happened soon and that it looked like a natural death.

S
O YOU'RE SAYING
, D
R
. K
APLAN, THAT PROSTITUTION
ISN'T
THE
oldest profession?"

     Hearing the radio DJ's voice on the cassette tape made her hackles rise again, just as they had during the original on-air interview. Ophelia had recorded their informal chat and was now incorporating the transcripts into her newest book:
In Defense of Our Ancestors.

     Focusing on her work kept her from obsessing on the possibility that she was pregnant—a fact that she would not know until the pregnancy test kit arrived.

     "I'm sorry, Dr. Kaplan," the nurse had said the night before. "The drugstore in Palm Springs got the order wrong. I had to requisition it again. But I assure you, on the very first flight in the morning..."

     Ophelia looked at her watch. Nearly eight. The jet should be arriving any minute. She lifted her face to the blue sky and thought how deep and endless it was. The same sky that people had lived beneath millions of years ago.

     Ophelia's people.

     "So what
is
the oldest profession, if not prostitution?" The DJ's voice drifted away on the perfumed breeze. Ophelia was sitting in one of The Grove's flower gardens, riotous with spring blooms. And as she listened to her response, she simultaneously typed on her laptop keyboard: "Archaeological evidence points to cave dwellers as living in groups separated by gender. The women and children on one side of the shelter, males on the other. Women did not need men, or mates, for protection and food. They had the group. Therefore there was no need to 'sell' sexual favors. Humans engaged in sexual intercourse the same way animals in the wild do. It wasn't until humans began pair bonding, and a woman found herself dependent upon a male for protection and food, that sex was used as barter. Prior to that, there were more important professions already in place. The healer or shaman. The medicinal herb gatherer. The keeper of fire. Without these the clan would perish, and so such members of the group would have been held in high esteem and been lavished with favors by the clan."

     "Dr. Kaplan?"

     Ophelia stopped typing and squinted up at the person standing against the morning sun. The nurse. "The plane has just arrived and I am on my way to meet it. I should have the supplies in a few minutes. If you would care to come to my office—"

     "No," Ophelia said quickly. "I prefer to conduct the test in private." After all, that was why she was here, away from David and her mother and her sisters. This was something she had to face alone.

     The young woman smiled. "Very well. I can meet you at your suite in, say, fifteen minutes?" And she was off, long black braid swinging energetically across her back.

     Fifteen minutes. And Ophelia would know her fate. And the fate of her marriage.

     "I'm glad we see eye to eye on the issue of children," David had said when they started to discuss the possibility of marriage. David did not want children. "Too dangerous," he said, referring to the damaged gene, for which he had tested positive. "We have each other, and our work." Ophelia had agreed. After what her sister went through with Sophie's incurable illness
and death before the age of five, Ophelia had vowed she never wanted to have babies and was thrilled to have found a man who agreed.

     
I'll meet you at your suite in fifteen minutes...

     Ophelia turned off the recorder and closed her laptop. Gathering the rest of her things, she rose from the marble bench and in that instant the breeze shifted, and a floral scent she had not detected earlier suddenly washed over her.

     Ophelia staggered, reached out for the lamp post to steady herself. The scent was overpowering. Cloying—too sickly sweet to be pleasant. But familiar. She didn't know the name, what flower it came from—but she
knew
it! Where from? What did the fragrance mean?

     Her vision was suddenly filled with other sights: a hospital room crowded with flowers, a waiting room filled with people, and Ophelia as a child, suffocated and scared.

     A memory? But of what?

     She followed the sickly perfume until she homed in on the specific flower in the garden, standing tall and white, the label identifying it as narcissus. It nauseated her. And terrified her. She broke out in a cold sweat and she felt suddenly dizzy. Stumbling to the marble bench, she quickly sat down and pressed her forehead on her knees.

     After a few minutes, the attack passed—or whatever it was. But it had left her drenched in perspiration and shaky in the legs. And as she got unsteadily to her feet, a memory flashed in her mind: Ophelia sitting on her grandfather's lap at a family gathering. He was not elderly then—she recalled thick black hair and a deep laugh. She had been very little. But something had happened,
Zayde
Abraham had said or done something that had hurt her. She had blanked it out. David had tried to help her recall it, even suggesting hypnotism, to no avail. He believed Ophelia's competitiveness and drive to over-achieve was rooted in that moment.

     What had her grandfather done?

     Ophelia hurried from the garden, from the past, from radio DJs who accused her of being promiscuous, from the sickly scent of a flower that terrified her.

     The package was already in her room. The nurse had wisely ordered two.

     Her heart thumping wildly, Ophelia opened the first box.

     "Tay-Sachs Disease is caused by the absence of a vital enzyme called Hexosamindase A." The physician's voice cool and objective, as if lecturing on the life cycle of a frog while Ophelia and her sister sat in stunned silence. "Carriers of the disease can be identified by a simple blood test that measures hexosaminidase A activity. Both parents must be carriers in order to have an affected child. When both parents are found to carry a genetic mutation in hexosaminidase A, there is a twenty-five percent chance with each pregnancy that the child will be affected with Tay-Sachs disease."

     "What are the odds?" Ophelia had asked. She and her sister sitting close together facing the doctor behind the desk, Ophelia there to give her sister support because the brother-in-law wouldn't come. They already knew most of this information because of Sophie, who had died at age five of TSD. What were the odds of it happening again?

     "A person's chances of being a TSD carrier," the doctor had replied, "are significantly higher if he or she is of Eastern European Jewish, that is, Ashkenazi, descent. Which I understand you are. Approximately one in every twenty-seven Jews in the United States is a carrier of the TSD gene."

     They had left the doctor's office unsatisfied, and six months later her sister's husband walked out on her.

     And then Ophelia met David who was of Ashkenazi extraction and already knew he was a carrier. He had been tested when he came close to marrying several years prior. "I don't want children," he had said when their relationship was growing serious. Ophelia said she didn't want children either, that she was dedicated to her career. Whether or not she meant it at the time she couldn't say. She wanted David, she wanted a career. Children were vague little shadows in the sidelines. And at Sophie's grave she had vowed:
This will never happen to me.

     And so she had not submitted to the genetic test. She was on birth control. Her chances of getting pregnant were remote. Still, everyone said, she should have the test. When asked why she didn't, Ophelia couldn't explain it other than to say "It isn't necessary." But David thought it was because Ophelia didn't want to be told she had a defect. Ophelia had to be successful and perfect in everything. Mutant genes were for other people.

     As she collected a urine sample and unwrapped the test stick with shaking hands, she wished now she had undergone the genetic test. Was there a child, at that moment, growing within her that was destined to die before its fifth birthday?

     She dipped the test stick into her urine and watched the stick turn color. Unlike the previous test kit that provided two pink lines as proof of pregnancy, this one spelled it out in words.

     After sixty seconds, tiny black letters appeared ghost-like on the stick.
You Are Pregnant.