When Venus Fell

  Mom always assumed I wouldn’t fear anything if she said it only happened to people outside our own geographic boundaries. Boogeymen, closet monsters, and other assorted childhood devils all lived in Russia, for example. She was a child of the Cold War, afraid of Russians like everyone else back then. I’m sure Pop’s leftist political leanings scared her, too. I expect she worried that some fanatical ideology might slither across the Ukraine in Pop’s vulnerable direction.

  “England,” she repeated soothingly.

  “What killed Gib’s parents in England?” I persisted.

  She gave up on diplomacy, at that point. “Some bad men set a bomb in a hotel where Gib’s parents were staying. They happened to be in the hotel when the bomb blew up.”

  “And they got blowed up, too? In big pieces?”

  Even now I vividly recall Mom’s amazed expression. “You’ll have scary dreams if you think like that, sweetie. Little girls don’t want to hear about people getting, uhmmm, passing away.”

  “Pop says—”

  “Yes, all right, they were blown up. But the bad men who did it won’t ever come here and blow up anyone we know.”

  “The bad men live in Russia?”

  “No. They live in Ireland.”

  “Did the police arrest ’em?”

  “No, the police never found the bad men. But the bad men live in Ireland and don’t like to travel. I promise.”

  “I bet Gib will go find ’em. And kill ’em. I bet he will.”

  “No, he was only your age when his mommie and daddy passed away—”

  “Got blowed all up.”

  “Went to England.”

  “He’ll get ’em. The bad men. I bet.”

  She heaved an exhausted sigh. “My whole point is that now you understand why Gib is lonely, and why he needs a friend like you. And I hope you’ll always be friends with him. We’re going to visit him someday, as soon as your dad has time for a vacation.”

  I was hooked. He’d given my mother a magic rock that brought me into the world. He’d even given her the idea for my odd name.

  My sympathy for his orphanhood, my romantic imagination, and my little-girl conviction that every little boy is secretly enamored of her combined to convince me that he belonged to me.

  It helped that from the time I was born he’d sent me birthday cards and Christmas cards. He actually addressed them and signed them, in what could only have been his boyish, thick scrawl.

  Mom addressed birthday cards and Christmas cards to Gib for me in return, and I signed them as carefully as he signed his name for me. “VENUS LIKE THE STAR,” I always wrote in large, merry letters. Mom would write out what I wanted to say, and I would copy it. One year I added a tender, heartfelt postscript.

  “THE BAD MEN CAN’T GET US IF WE STAY PUT.”

  The world was a very cruel and unfair place, Pop said. We Arinellis truly were odd fruit, and we were also forgotten fruit. We’d flowered on vines that were never meant to entwine. Music was the one thing that linked us to every branch of our strange ancestry. Every one of my four long-dead grandparents had been a musician of some sort.

  Our paternal grandfather, Paolo Arinelli, had arrived in New York from Italy as an orphan sometime around 1910. He became a pianist and orchestra leader. An inborn talent for music was all he could afford to take with him from the old country.

  From his handsome pictures and Pop’s proud memories of him, my grandfather leaped out, larger than life, always in formal attire with his black hair slicked back perfectly, a music baton in his hand and a rakish smile on his lips, chasing women, drinking illegal liquor, making glorious music for glorious people.

  He met our grandmother in New York at a performance of a Japanese cultural troupe sponsored by the Japanese embassy.

  Akiko Nakado was the daughter of a prominent and very traditional Tokyo clan descended from a samurai. Dressed in an elaborate kimono, she knelt in front of a long, stringed koto, playing the traditional instrument with filmy finger picks, the music sounding like raindrops on a timpani; judging by her pictures she was as lovely as a silk-screen painting and as perfect as a haiku. She was only sixteen years old, and Paolo was thirty-five.

  When she ran away with him to California her family in Tokyo held a ritual ceremony. They declared her dead.

  Pop was born in Los Angeles in 1932. His life was charmed when he was small; Grandfather Paolo had become a successful composer and arranger for one of the major movie studios, listed in the credits of dozens of films under the name Paul Aaron. The name change wasn’t a choice forced on him by the studio. Grandpop was proud to be an American citizen. Grandmother Akiko devoted herself to the same holy grail. Pop remembered how she worked to perfect her English, studying American history even after she passed her citizenship exam.

  One of Pop’s dearest possessions was a photograph of himself as a boy posed with his parents at the rim of the Grand Canyon. The three of them had dressed in dungarees and matching checkered shirts, and all of them wore Angels baseball caps. Pop loved baseball and played third base like a charm.

  He was only ten years old when Grandfather Paolo was killed in World War II.

  Paolo had been too old to fight but not too old to tour with the USO. His plane went down en route to New York, where he was to perform for soldiers headed overseas.

  Pop and Grandmother Akiko were rounded up in Los Angeles with thousands of other Asian Americans and placed in an internment camp. They lost everything they owned; Pop suddenly stopped being an all-American baseball-playing kid and became an outsider. He never forgot the shock of being locked behind a fence for no good reason and no crime.

  Grandmother Akiko died of pneumonia the next year. That goddamned American gulag killed her, Pop always said.

  When the camps were opened, he had nowhere to go among millions of patriotic homefolk waiting to torment him. After all, he was half-Japanese, with black hair and almond eyes and skin the color of pale honey. It didn’t take long for him to learn to fight like a trapped dog in the back alleys of L.A.

  And he never stopped hating the government.

  When he was fifteen he lied about his age and got a job playing saxophone in a burlesque band. By the time he met Mom in 1962 he was a conductor and arranger for a record label. He’d played sax and piano for most of the big names in pop music, including Sinatra, who introduced him to pretty blond Shari Kirk when she sang backup on a Tony Bennett album.

  “This chick’s a sweet kid,” Sinatra said to Pop. “She’s got class. A guy like you needs a chick like her. Raises your level of expectations.”

  Pop took that advice to heart. He developed what Mom called dreams but strangers called pretensions. I heard people whisper it when I was small. I thought pretensions might be like chicken pox. You scratch and people notice it, but the wounds heal eventually. I was too embarrassed to ask Pop for an explanation of his disease. He looked fine to me, and I adored him.

  Together, Mom and Pop headed for the top. By the time I was born she’d become a two-hit girl singer—the last of the Doris Day clones, with flipped-up blond hair and a wholesome smile. She made a career singing sweet ballads about true love. Pop managed her career and wrote her music.

  They were good together, my parents.

  They deserved a happy ending.

  “My mom’s going to have an operation,” I told our next-door neighbor. “I need some voodoo advice.”

  Mrs. Duvelle was a rich divorced woman, I had heard Mom say, very heavyset but very pretty. Mom rarely let me talk to her, even through the stone fence covered in jasmine, which separated our backyards. There were rumors about the men who visited her.

  But Mrs. Duvelle taught me voodoo, just enough to get by, she said, because I was special and would need all the help I could get. She swore it was all right for a Catholic girl to do it, but I decided to be on the safe side and not mention it to the nuns at school.

  I had already put the voodoo to the test with a sour-faced babysitter called
Nanny Robicheaux, who slapped Ella on the head when Pop wasn’t in the house. Maybe it was the mix of chicken’s foot (stolen from the market) and red paint (for blood) that scared her off, or maybe she got tired of my smart mouth, but she abruptly gave notice on the very day I’d flung the bloody-looking mess on the patio where she was enjoying a cigarette break.

  Sister Mary Catherine, a lemon-faced, strict old head nun, warned Pop that his religious and political anarchy would ruin me and Ella. Children raised to revere the church but also the godless activities of a lapsed parent will lose their way in the wilderness, Sister Mary Catherine said. Pop told her God was music and music was the church, as far as he was concerned, and that’s why he’d agreed with Mom to choose Catholic school for Ella and me, because Catholics have the best music. He said his daughters would always find their way.

  I had also used voodoo on Gib.

  I made a love charm from a piece of my straight black hair and a speck of congealed bacon grease, and I smeared the hairy goo on the back of the photo, above his face.

  Considering my successes with Nanny Robicheaux and Gib, I confidently set up a protective shrine for Mom. It included a piece of her hair, some of Pop’s whisker shavings, and my quartz rock. I hid it in my closet.

  “Take care of Pop and Ella for me until I get back home from the hospital,” she said cheerfully, and I promised. It was a heavy load for a first grader, even one deemed a child prodigy. “We are a very special family,” she said. “We don’t have grandparents, or aunts and uncles or cousins, like most other people. So we have to take care of each other especially well. You and Pop and Ella and me.”

  “I know. Stick like glue and shake our fists at Uncle Sam.”

  I remember her rubbing her forehead as she considered that. I had gotten the words from overhearing Pop discuss the government. “It’s not polite to shake your fist,” she countered. “Just give Ella and Pop lots of hugs while I’m gone.”

  “I promise. But you’ll be back right away—Pop says so. I just wish he weren’t going off to the hospital all the time, too. I don’t want Sister Mary Catherine to come here. She only watches Lawrence Welk on TV. If I could just go sit at the hospital I’d be real quiet and nobody’d even know I was waiting for you.”

  I’m sure Mom realized how frightened I was. “If you need to talk to someone you can talk to Gib in the wedding picture,” Mom said gently. “I’ve always known you like to share things with him. I mean, just in case you feel like you need to talk to someone until I come back home. He’ll always be there. Promise me you’ll talk to him?”

  “I promise. And I promise I’ll take the best care of Ella and Pop.”

  Mom hugged me. “Then I won’t worry about a thing,” she whispered. I latched my arms around her neck. She held me so long I fell asleep, and so my last memory of her is warmth, and peaceful dreams, and the scent of her perfume against my cheek.

  She died the next day, during what was supposed to be a routine hysterectomy; her congenitally weak heart couldn’t tolerate the anesthesia. I remember Pop sitting on my bed that night and holding on to me for dear life, and I remember crying until I was sick—the first of many times like that. I remember patting his head in sympathy. I remember him crying against my hair. It was the only time I ever knew he was capable of tears.

  I was suddenly the lady of our house. I became the self-appointed helpmate of a brilliant but embittered father and a sweet, delicate baby sister who chirped like a bird when she was upset. Pop treated me like a small adult. Immediately he took Ella and me to a salon to have our black hair dyed blond, and he insisted we keep it that way; he was trying to erase even the smallest evidence of our ethnic background. He’d never forgotten the prejudice and abuse heaped on him as a child.

  I sensed he had changed in some hopeless ways I couldn’t understand yet. But he had big dreams for me and Ella, especially for me, and I knew I’d never let him down. Still, I was desperate for comfort and advice. I talked to Gib’s picture constantly.

  When I was older I understood that Pop began to withdraw from the light after he lost Mom. That he immediately started tightening the circle of people in our lives that he trusted. But when I was little I obeyed his strange whims blindly, with wild, devoted, miserable confusion.

  For a while I continued to believe I’d meet Gib someday. I needed to share my miseries with him face-to-face. I needed to tell him that, like him, I didn’t have a mother now. I asked Pop several times when we could go to Tennessee. Mom had promised. I was worried. I hadn’t gotten a card from Gib in a long time.

  We had already become a house that the postman passed by. Pop channeled all the household mail through the club. And we had an unlisted phone number. It was the beginning of his secrecies, when his anger at the world began to grow around us like thorny vines. Sentimental ideas, Pop finally explained, had no place in a disciplined person’s life.

  “We have to take care of ourselves. Every day has only a precious amount of time, not something to waste on people we barely know,” Pop told me. “Gib and his family aren’t like us. They don’t understand what we’re all about. You don’t want Gib to grow up expecting you to be a type of person that you’re not. You’re going to be a very special and important person. You don’t ever want to be helpless, do you? Being too friendly with other people makes you dependent, and then people take advantage of you.”

  “I don’t want to be helpless, Pop,” I recited fervently. But I was heartbroken and bewildered. Pop had turned me into a silent soldier in his one-man war on ideological crimes committed against our family.

  My duty—as Pop directed me—was to perform brilliantly on concert stages. In that arena I’d rise to a rank so high that no one in the world would dare harm me or anyone else Pop loved.

  I missed Gib for years.

  Three

  I was nineteen years old when Pop’s bitter choices caught up with him. I thought he had cloistered us from a world that lurked outside our door with the threat of eternal evil, but that year, 1988, our protected lives began to unravel.

  Federal court judge Lytel Billings, his wife, and their three teenage sons burned to death in an arson fire at their upstate New York house. The story was plastered all over TV and the newspapers for weeks. Billings had been on the Reagan administration’s shortlist of Supreme Court candidates. His fans loved his merciless, hard-line record on immigration law. I knew all about Judge Billings because Pop hated his guts.

  “If Billings had his way my daughters would be labeled as second-generation Jap-Wop on every document from their birth certificates to their driver’s licenses,” I’d heard Pop say more than once. “Hell, he’d probably have ethnic code numbers tattooed on their arms like the goddamned Nazis.”

  But then Pop despised a lot of prominent judges and politicians; our house had always been littered with left-wing newsletters and magazines that stopped just short of calling for all-out anarchy.

  Pop taught us to distrust and scrutinize all government programs and authority—I could sniff out a potential conspiracy or official corruption, real or imagined, a mile away. But that had all been a game to me, growing up in a safe, tree-lined, moss-draped, expensive New Orleans neighborhood where the local police officers knew Ella and me by name.

  The Louisiana state attorney general, for God’s sake, was a regular visitor to Pop’s nightclub. The governor had once sat in on drums with a clarinet man named Blues Joe, and Pop let me play keyboard with them. The government was made up of friendly, familiar faces, and We the People included Venus and Ella Arinelli.

  I had never taken Pop’s rants seriously. Ella and I had been weaned on his extravagant rhetoric—the political meetings he attended, the passionate activists’ groups he hosted, and the frequent dinners at our house where the guests were old-style radicals from the music world. They scared Ella, who refused to listen, but I hid at the top of the stairs, grinning as aging musicians shouted opinions at Pop and each other before adjourning to the music room
to hold ad-lib jazz sessions. When I thought about Pop’s leftist politics I imagined them underscored by jazz rifts and scented with the mellow, sweet-musky smell of marijuana. They seemed quaint.

  So even though the murders of Judge Billings and his family meant more in our household than to most Americans, it was only because we were already familiar with a whole gallery full of Pop’s ideological dragons. I couldn’t imagine it meant more than that. Whatever dark childhood fears I’d had about his eccentric and controversial ideas, I lived a pampered life.

  I dressed like a poster girl for upper-class preppies—a lot of plaid, a lot of khaki, and my hair straight, shoulder-length, and still a soft honey shade, like Mom’s. When I was a teenager I rolled my eyes at Pop’s outdated ideas about prejudice against Asian Americans, but did as he told me to do. I looked in the mirror and saw a green-eyed blond with large, slightly hooded eyes. I was exactly who and what Pop told me to be.

  Safe behind his wall of hate.

  • • •

  Pop watched proudly as I won the most prestigious classical pianist competition in the Southeast, the preliminary auditions for the Van Cliburn International competition. I was moving swiftly into the kind of adult acclaim given to only a few pianists in the world.

  I’d travel to Texas to compete in the finals with about thirty of the best young pianists in the world. I was the first female finalist in the history of the Van Cliburn—if I won or even placed at the silver or bronze level I’d be guaranteed concert tours, recording contracts, international recognition. Pop was convinced I’d take the gold medal. So was I. Confidence ran deep in our family then.

  Until the day of the finals. When I glanced into the wings as I bowed to applause, I saw my sister sobbing hysterically in the matronly, peach-clad arms of the public-relations woman, while the competition’s program director motioned wildly for me to hurry.

  I bolted from the stage as gracefully as possible in a billowing satin gown. Ella fell into my outstretched hands. She was a daisy-like sixteen-year-old who looked much younger. “Pop’s in some kind of trouble,” she cried. “The police took him away! It has something to do with the murder of that judge!”