Viagra’s was actually beginning to make a profit. “Harvey’s right about the cheap labor and low food costs compared to the rest of the world. You keep things the way people like them, you’ve got customers, steady customers who live forever.”
With the Internet and e-mail, he could communicate with the outside world. Downstairs at Viagra’s, he communicated with a rural and aging America. He also wrote articles he could sell to the outside world without having to live in it. “I don’t know how long I’ll stay, but right now I love it. Like you love Hollywood, Charlie Greene. Now, let’s get your clothes to washing before the power lines come down with the weight of ice and snow.”
After the home place, and during an ice-and-snowstorm brutal beyond imagining, upstairs at Viagra’s was a paradise beyond imagining. Fed, warm, safe from Gentle Oaks, Charlie drifted off to the voices of her mother and the writer whispering somewhere among the bookcases while doing her laundry, and to Uncle Elmo’s snores. And she was even aware of when she sank further into a sleep, deep as the snow piling up outside, in Kenny’s T-shirt, which, like his coat, came to her knees.
Charlie lay naked in the dirt and watched by candlelight as Kenneth Cowper lowered himself on top of her with a humorless grin. She was trying to remember why she should want to fight him off. He was unbelievably beautiful. She must have forgotten something. Her body ached like in a stupid romance.
And then a scream, and right over the hunk’s shoulder she saw a door in the ceiling lift up, and a halo of light above it revealed wooden steps. But above everything stood Great-aunt Abigail Staudt, looking like a vengeful god with the halo haloing her whole body and with a bloody package in her arms.
“Harlot,” she yelled and threw the package down on Charlie. Kenny was gone by now, of course. But there was an old, yet polished, still next to the wooden steps, the Tin Man’s funnel hat still on top.
“Charlie?” Her mother’s voice. “For godsake, Charlie, you’ll hurt yourself. What is it?”
“It’s all bloody. Get it off me.”
“It’s a dream.” Edwina. “She had one last night, too. Since the accident—”
“No, it’s a baby. It’s dead. Get it off.”
“Charlie?” Kenny Cowper. “Elmo, grab her feet.”
“Relax, Charlie, and open your eyes. You can’t see till you open your eyes. Now take a deep breath and another. Relax. You closed your eyes again, why?”
“Boy, she’s strong for such a little thing.” Uncle Elmo. What was he doing down here?
“I don’t want to see it. It’s all dead and bloody. I can’t move. Kenny, I can’t move.”
“It’s because I’m lying across your stomach, Uncle Elmo’s got your feet, and Kenny has you by the shoulders. Charlie, you’ve got to wake up—don’t sink back into that hell, whatever it is.”
They forced her to stand and then to walk. The floor was wood and not dirt. It was daylight, and there was no door in the ceiling. “No baby.”
“No blood. Keep walking,” Edwina ordered on one side of her.
“Tell us about the dream,” Uncle Elmo said on the other side. “That way, it won’t come back.”
Kenny stood in front of her, barefoot, in tight Levi’s, no shirt—
“Oh, Jesus.”
“Keep walking. Don’t close your eyes.”
—hair still wet from the shower, one half of his face still covered in shaving cream—and of course with her contacts out, he was clothed in a warm, fuzzy—
“Oh, boy.”
“What?”
“I almost did it again. Can women do that?”
“Do what?”
“They can’t. It’s a male fantasy, dreamed up by Frank Sinatra’s press agent. Read all about that in Variety.”
“I better grind some coffee,” Kenny said and turned his back on Charlie.
“Oh, no. Don’t do that. Ohhh, oh, my God.”
“I’m shoving her straight into the shower, Uncle Elmo. Could you bring her clothes from the dryer?”
“Yeah, that and Kenny’s coffee ought to bring her around. You sure she’s not on some kind of drugs, Edwina? That was one strange way of reacting there.”
CHAPTER 19
A SHOWER AND a shampoo, clean clothes to put on afterward. Kenny Cowper-Cooper even had a hair dryer and presented Charlie with a latté adorned with nutmeg sprinkles when she came out of the bathroom. Thank God he had his shirt on. Good thing her mother and Uncle Elmo were here, too. Charlie’s main weakness with guy anatomy was the well-formed male back. Forget the buns. Just the back of the back.
“And I have for you,” the barkeep announced, “an egg-delight hot dish that will warm your innards.” His face was half-shadowed by beard because Charlie’s shower had used up the rest of the hot water before the power lines failed and the water he was heating had to make coffee. “And hot rolls from the freezer and, Elmo, real live bacon.”
The hot dish was one of those baked scrambled-egg-potato concoctions, with onions and garlic and cheese and more little veggie bits, that you cut in squares. Kenny had a gas stove to cook on and a wood stove to heat with, and even an old hand-crank coffee grinder from the museum.
The snow had stopped coming down and now blew into drifts instead to further entrap Charlie with the curse of Myrtle and maybe her own. She sure hoped the Sinclair carried feminine supplies as well as videos.
Kenny’s nest reminded Charlie of several lofts she’d visited in the Village when she lived in Manhattan. The walls were exposed brick with old-fashioned radiators under the windows and metal pole supports where once there had been a load-bearing wall dividing rooms. All it lacked was the noise of a busy street outside, the elevator, the buzzer, and the security cameras.
Uncle Elmo went downstairs to smoke. Edwina insisted on cleaning up the kitchen. Kenny brought out the photo album they’d begun to look through at the museum before Charlie’s nonexistent skills as a crime-scene investigator had been called up to the Oaks.
“You never did tell us what your dream was about except for the dead baby with blood on it,” Kenny said as he opened the album on the coffee table.
“I was in the fruit cellar with a candle like poor Myrtle. Great-aunt Abigail opened the door and threw the bloody thing down on me.” And, like a typical male, you disappeared. Every time she shows up, you’re outta there.
Edwina came over from her side of the kitchen bookcases. “That woman used to give me nightmares, too. And my mother. And now my daughter. Tell you one thing, we’ll never bring Libby here unless that old witch is dead. Maybe not even then.”
“Libby’s your granddaughter, I assume.”
And of course Edwina had to show him a picture or two from her billfold.
Kenny’s whistle went dry.
“Stay away from my daughter, Squirt,” Charlie told him.
“Yes, ma’am. You got any pictures of Charlie when she was a baby?”
“Why would she have a picture of me as a baby when she’s got a gorgeous babe for a granddaughter?”
“That’s all you know about me, smartass.” And Edwina pulled a small black-and-white photo in a protective plastic casing from somewhere deep in her wallet.
Kenny studied the photo and then turned a batch of thick pages in the album, turned them forward and back a few times. Finally he laid the coated photo down on a page. In Edwina’s photo, a totally bald baby with enormous dark eyes appeared to float in the folded arms resting on a lap of someone mostly out of the frame.
But on the page, the identical baby—in an identical one-piece terrycloth version of a jumpsuit, with feet and snaps up the front—stared at Charlie from Marlys Dittberner’s lap. Marlys wore a tight, sleeveless top, her pale hair disappearing down her back, straight-cut bangs covering her forehead—reminding Charlie of old pictures of the young Mary of Peter, Paul, and Mary fame. Even by this time, Marlys was too old to be showing upper arms gone loose-fleshed and wrinkly.
“I’m beginning to think there’s more to the
curse of Myrtle than living too long.” The barkeep author turned back some pages to a baby looking much like the one that was supposed to be Charlie, but wearing a white dress with eyelets and booties on her feet, fat little legs showing beneath her skirt, the same big eyes staring up at Charlie—Libby’s eyes. Marlys carried more weight here and wore her hair in a bun. She had thick shoulder pads and dark lipstick.
“You believe in curses?”
“I believe in people believing in curses. I believe in frantic mothers trying to keep their daughters straight in a world that approves of boys being boys so they can learn to be men. Frantic mothers pointing out what happened to the legendary Myrtle down through the generations. Because the tiny town of Myrtle had some large and unique problems, or at least thought it did, and had to lay the blame somewhere. If you consider yourself moral and upright but shit keeps happening—you have to find the devil causing it. Without alluding to it, of course.”
“So what was Marlys Dittberner’s role in all this?” Charlie asked.
“I don’t think I know,” Edwina said. She was sitting on the back of a couch, dishtowel still in hand. “But my mother sent me that picture of a baby available for adoption. Your father already had two nearly grown children by his first marriage and wasn’t anxious for another. But he finally agreed to adoption.”
Kenny had once overheard someone down in the bar pointing out to his elders the color of his eyes as part of the curse, obliquely of course, and he remembered it but hadn’t understood it until years later in Florida. He’d confronted his mother and she’d slapped his face and then fallen into his arms crying instead of answering his question. “Seems my little sister was pregnant—she was fifteen. My mother thought by getting us out of Myrtle, she’d escaped the curse. I think the book I’m researching now and intend to write next began that day. That’s while I was still at Florida State and had never published a thing. This is the sucker I was born to write.”
“So dark-eyed folks are cursed to live too long or get pregnant as teens. Great Witch Abigail said those with black eyes should not spawn, and I’m a perfect example of why. But you will not get pregnant, Kenny.”
“I didn’t understand it until I came back here—what? nine, ten months ago—and filtered through some of the innuendo and the unspoken. We, Charlie, are cursed with being oversexed.”
Tell me about it, Charlie thought.
“Tell me about it,” Edwina said aloud.
“Mom—”
“Charlie, the entire community, tiny though it is, follows your career avidly. Because you have our eyes and you had a child out of wedlock. I didn’t know about you, or don’t remember if I did, until I moved back here to take over the family pool hall and found out they even knew about my sister’s abortion. There are grandparents here who will not let their granddaughters visit them in Myrtle. Helen and Buz have two dark-eyed beauties in Lincoln, Nebraska, that they go visit but never invite. The whole thing is the power of myth, of legend, of things like curses, even in down-to-earth places like Myrtle, or maybe especially in places like this because of the guilt brought on by unrealistic expectations of what morality can accomplish. Farming communities know a lot about animal and plant nature, too. Sometimes it’s hard to sync with God’s plan according to the Puritans.”
“You still haven’t told me about Marlys.”
He turned back some of the album’s pages and there was “the house.” It had been ornate and grand—obvious even in sepia—and nearly as big as Harvey Rochester’s house, but older. The porch had curlicues everywhere. And the front lawn then had a semicircular drive where a little girl with what appeared to be white hair posed in a pony cart and held the pony’s reins and looked directly at the camera. The caption read MARLYS STAUDT AT THE HOUSE.
“That’s Marlys Dittberner? She was a Staudt before she was married? How old is she? I thought the home place was where the Staudts started.”
“Wealthy farming families often had a house in town for the older generations to retire to so the next could do the farming. It’s hard to find dates for things—her generation was born at home and women who didn’t work weren’t kept track of except in family bibles.”
“She worked,” Edwina pointed out. “She was running Dittberner’s when I was a girl, and she was an old lady then, I swear.”
“I haven’t been able to find any records on her or bibles either,” Kenny said, “but by what I have tracked down going on around her, she’s got to be something over a hundred and five or six anyway.”
“But she’s still up and walking.” Charlie leaned over the album.
“And the smartest person with no brain I’ve met this side of Capitol Hill,” Kenny said.
“Del thinks she’s my great-grandmother.”
The unmistakable growls of Mr. Rochester registered below and ascended the stairs to Kenny’s loft. He appeared without coat or hat but from mid-thigh down, he was coated with snow. He stood surveying them all, a grinning Uncle Elmo behind him, and emoted, “Barkeep, sir. I am in need. Desperate need.”
Charlie had the fleeting thought that if she tried to tell anyone at Congdon and Morse, Inc., on Wilshire in Beverly Hills, about Harvey Rochester—or anybody in this room, or in this tiny town, or in Gentle Oaks, or the Myrtle Cemetery even—she’d be laughed right out of the office.
“Tell me, Kenneth, that you can brew some of your demon coffee, with perhaps a dollop of brandy in it and spare a dry piece of toast for a poor and weary pilgrim in this infested place.”
While the teakettle heated over the gas flame and more of the casserole and rolls were rewarmed and after the noise of the hand-crank coffee grinder, Harvey Rochester explained that dear Elsina Miller, beloved administrator of Gentle Oaks, had, against all odds, walked through the storm to Harvey’s house and demanded shelter and food last night.
“I left her with cornflakes, preaching to a dozen Mexicans in a language they only barely understand and from a culture that reveres one woman only—the Virgin Mary, who in any language our Elsina is not. Well—she’s likely a virgin.” He paused for a moment at that thought, studying it, then blinked it away. “But Teresa and Miguel are there to keep them all in line. I, by God, had to escape.”
“Why not to the Oaks?” Charlie asked.
“Listen to me, my child. I spent the night before at that bedlam for ancient psychopaths in the full of the moon. They were still howling last night pretty good, too. Then the power goes off. Then our resident gravedigger, plowman, and upholder of law and order is careening about the town in the humvee of dump trucks like a loose lunatic—I literally had to run for cover twice on the way here and he didn’t even see me. I shouted profanities and he didn’t hear. Let us hope he runs out of gas before he kills someone.” He gentled down when coffee and the casserole on a tray appeared before him, with rewarmed dinner rolls, jam, and butter. “For you, sir, there is a place in heaven, I vow,” he told his host.
“Edwina, why did you lie to me all these years about where I came from?”
“I didn’t want you coming back here to find out about this place and the supposed curse. So I said I got you in Boulder.”
“You are a scientist. You don’t believe in curses.”
“No, but like Kenny, I believe in the power of guilt and the uses to which it can be put. The traps it can lay. But this time, I didn’t have the strength to face Myrtle alone.”
“Mom, did your mother have these eyes? You said she was pregnant when she married.”
“Yeah, she did,” Elmo answered instead. “Edwina, do you realize that we are the only people in this room who don’t have the Myrtle eyes?”
Not for the first time, but even more urgently now, Charlie was wondering what her own black-eyed daughter was up to while the cat was away.
CHAPTER 20
“SO WHY WAS I born in Marlys Dittberner’s house? And why did she end up with the Staudt house in town instead of the guys in the family in this agrarian, male chauvinist, Taliban societ
y?”
“You work in Hollywood and call this a chauvinist society?” Kenny brought her another cup of coffee—not a latté, just tasty and rich.
So she peed all day. So she’d get some Depends. Probably carried them at the Sinclair station.
A knocking sounded from somewhere below, “Uh, Kenny? It’s Ben.”
“Come on up, Ben. Saved you some breakfast and there’s coffee in the pot.”
Kenny presented the watchman with a steaming cup, a glass of orange juice, and returned to the gas stove to cook some more bacon.
“I didn’t get bacon,” Harvey complained.
“You’re already the fat cat in town. Ben’s our token homeless person.” No wonder their host had made a whole casserole. It was fast disappearing.
“What do you mean, homeless? He gets a free bed in the back room of the Sinclair and his washing done by the mayor,” Mr. Rochester pointed out.
“It’s not free. I’m the town watchman.”
“Doing what? Never mind.”
“It’s on the books,” Kenny said over the bacon sizzle.
“Myrtle’s got books?” Harvey Rochester stared at Ben and Elmo, who simply shrugged.
“Ben breakfasts at the Schoolhouse Café during the week, but it’s probably not open today because of the snow, and he lunches here at noon, has his dinner in the kitchen at The Station in the evening while they’re getting it ready for the Oaks. All part of his pay for being watchman, huh, Ben?”
Determined not to let them deter her with rural fables this time, Charlie insisted, “So why doesn’t anybody answer my questions?”
“Because you ask too many at once and we forget what they are,” Elmo said.
“Okay, so why was I born in Marlys Dittberner’s house?”
“She was in the habit of taking in runaway girls. They usually run away in them days because they found themselves in the family way. Back then, a girl in that condition and without a husband tended to disappear. ‘Whatever happened to pretty little Alice?’ ‘Oh, she went off to Ohio to live with her Aunt Helga, who’s sick and needs someone around to help out.’ And that’s the last you’d ever hear of pretty little Alice. Just disappeared. Nobody wanted to talk about it.”