When Venus Fell

  “He’d had a helluva hard life as a kid. I know that explains a lot about him. How he turned out. His politics. I try to remember that when I make judgments about him.

  “But when I was little I didn’t know he’d been beaten half to death in gang fights when he was growing up after World War Two. I just thought he looked different.

  “He asked me if I had time to escort your mother around over the weekend, because he had work to do. And I told him I had plenty of time for an extra girl.

  “He shook my hand again. And your mother didn’t laugh at me. She said she’d be honored.

  “That was the best day I’d had in months.”

  “We couldn’t treat your folks like customers—we weren’t clear on that aspect of running an inn yet. They were a test—they were the first paying visitors. They were the only guests in the house.

  “At supper Bea set them at the big dining room by themselves but it seemed—well, too fussy and too lonely for two people. All that china and crystal and a table big enough for twenty. Bea asked them if they’d like to join the family and they looked kind of relieved and said yes. So there they were the first night, in our little Formica dining room of the family wing.

  “FeeMolly overwhelmed your folks with all the food she rolled out. We still have the menu in a scrapbook Aunt Olivia keeps. Quail casserole and all sorts of homegrown vegetables, homemade yeast rolls and pies and cakes—not to mention the best wine in the house. Your dad said we couldn’t go on treating strangers this well or we’d go broke. Your mother said the brochure told the truth. That we made them feel like family. She said neither one of them had any family, and I remembered being sort of embarrassed for them. Aunt Olivia wrote on the table with a pen: You’re our good-luck charm. So we’ll dub you honorary family.

  “I think that pleased them no end. I think that was when your dad began to relax a little.

  “After dinner he played the piano and your mother sang for us in the library of the main rooms. All sorts of songs, our own private show—your dad on the piano and your mother singing. This went on for hours. We all loved it. I sat on the floor with one arm around Shep—he was one of Bea’s imported sheepdogs—and the other clutching Isabel, and I didn’t want that night to ever end.

  “They were magic, your folks.

  “The next morning your mother got up early and she asked me if I’d show her around—go walking with her. She wanted to come down here to the hot springs. Your dad was working on musical arrangements. I was so proud that your mother thought I was man enough to escort her around the valley. This was important to me. But I told her I had to take my baby sisters, too. Simon had put me in charge of them.

  “She said she’d be glad to help me baby-sit. It was clear she loved children. So off we went. I hoped the mailman or the sheriff would drive up and see us. I wanted to show her off. She was dressed in a yellow bathing suit, with an open white shirt over it, and white shorts, and white sandals. Her toenails and fingernails were painted bright pink. She put a broad yellow sunhat on her hair and tied it beneath her chin. We have a picture of her.

  “Anyhow—we set off down the road, your mother pushing Isabel in her stroller and me pulling Ruth in a toy wagon. It was a nasty-hot day for September, and the trees didn’t shade the spring quite as much as they do now. But when we got down there your mother shucked her shorts and sat down in the water. I didn’t understand why she wanted to sit in warm water on a hot day. I’d never heard of a hot tub. Maybe she hadn’t either, in nineteen sixty-eight.

  “I had on shorts and a T-shirt so I sat like this with my feet in the water, with Isabel asleep in her stroller and Ruthie splashing around in the shallow edge.

  “I asked your mother why she and her husband didn’t have any kids, since she liked kids so much. I remember she said something about wanting babies worse than anything else in the world. I didn’t understand why she didn’t have any if she wanted them so much. I thought she might be like Min’s Aunt Beebee. Now Beebee—at least this was the way I heard it when I was little—Beebee couldn’t have babies because she kept looking under the wrong cabbages in her cabbage patch. Also known as barking up the wrong tree, in terms of the husbands Beebee picked out.

  “I said that to your mother—the cabbages theory—and she laughed. I remember that. Then she got quiet and said she’d look under all the cabbages in her garden if she got the chance. That she would love to have babies.

  “That’s when I gave her a rock.

  “I always carried some of my wishing rocks in my pocket, rubbing them like worry stones or fetishes. I told her my mother said they were pieces of the evening star, and that it was good luck to wish on the evening star, but that she’d have to come down here at dark and wait until she saw the star in the water, and then wish. Your mother asked me, How does the star make a reflection if there are trees overhead?

  “I’d wondered about this technical point myself, but my mother had always explained it away—you had to trust that the reflection was there. That the evening star would make your wish come true when the time was right. That was the trick. Timing.

  “I told your mother that was why some of my wishes never came true. I just couldn’t get the timing right. She asked me what I wished for the most. A toy, a trip to Disneyland, what?

  “I told her I wished my parents weren’t dead.

  “Your mother started crying. At the time I had no idea how a child saying something like that would upset someone with a soft heart. So she was crying, and I was embarrassed and confused.

  “Then all of a sudden she said she felt too hot, and she started to get out of the water, but she didn’t make it. She fainted.

  “Just went limp. Slid down in the deep center here. I grabbed her under the arms. I wasn’t strong enough to pull her out of the spring, and I couldn’t let go or she’d drown. So I only managed to keep her head above water. Ruth looked like she might fall in the deep part at any second, and I’m thinking, What do I do if Ruth falls in, too?

  “I started yelling for help. Shep always watched Ruthie like she was a lamb, so he decided that Ruthie was the reason I was yelling, and he took hold of her by the back of her sundress and pulled her out of the water’s edge.

  “Ruthie never liked being herded like mutton on the hoof, so she pitched a fit. I’m yelling at the top of my lungs, Ruthie’s screeching, Shep starts barking—and all that time I’m desperately trying to hold your mother’s head above water with my arms going numb.

  “It must have been only a few minutes but it felt like hours. Suddenly your father ran down the road. He’d started after us the way he said he would, and then heard the commotion. So he comes running full tilt and jumps in the spring. He gets one arm around your mother and one around me, and he pulls us both out.

  “Then he starts rocking your mother in his arms and shaking her a little, telling her to breathe, to wake up, and he looked like he was scared out of his mind. She came to and started crying again.

  “He held her and kept rocking her—and he’s checking the pulse in her wrist, and he puts his hand over her heart, and he asks her ‘What’s wrong?’ about a dozen times.

  “Finally she manages to say, ‘I’d die to have your babies.’

  “And he looked stunned. He said, after a minute, ‘You know I love you and I wouldn’t have a life if you died.’

  “I didn’t forget that. Words like that, with death still such a part of my thoughts every day—I remember that’s exactly what your parents said to each other. They kissed, and your dad looked over at me and put his arm around me. Your mother apologized for scaring me, and your dad told me I saved her life.

  “I saved her life. I’d finally made a difference in the matter of life and death. I couldn’t do anything about my folks being killed, but I could protect other people. I never forgot how that felt, that day, realizing the power to overcome grief by serving others. The power to make sense of the world by stopping some of the senseless pain.”

  “
Your dad wouldn’t let your mother walk back to the Hall. He sent me to get Simon to bring a car down. When we all got back to the Hall your dad carried her upstairs.

  “When your dad told the family what I’d done at the spring Simon went to the liquor cabinet and fixed me about a thimbleful of brandy, and he and Bea and Olivia drank a toast to me. I thought I’d burst with pride.

  “Your folks came downstairs a little while later. They confessed to Bea and Aunt Olivia that they’d lied about being married. They asked if we’d let them hold a ceremony in the chapel that afternoon. I think your dad knew he’d almost lost your mother at the spring, and it made him take stock of how he felt about her.

  “Aunt Olivia had Bea put the word out—and within a few hours we had a minister, and a photographer, and flowers, and even a wedding cake.

  “Your dad played the wedding march on the chapel’s antique organ—but the sound was majestic. And afterward he played a song he and your mother had written, and your mother sang with it. Words she’d written that afternoon.

  “And that song was ‘Evening Star.’ About my star. My wishing star. I will never in my life forget that song. We all went out front of the chapel with your folks, for pictures. I sat on the steps with my arm around Shep. I remember thinking that we would be all right, now. That the evening star must be watching and listening again.

  “The next afternoon, when your folks were getting ready to leave, they told Aunt Olivia they’d promote the Hall to everybody they knew. As it turned out, they mentioned their wedding to a reporter in the next city, and he wrote a feature article about the inn, and we got a lot of business from that. We got our start, because of your parents’ wedding here.

  “Before she left your mother put her arms around me and told me she’d made a wish on the star, that she’d wished for a baby girl, and that if her wish came true she’d name her Venus after the evening star, and maybe one day her daughter would come here to look at herself in the spring. That way I’d get to see her. And she’d bring me good luck.

  “She told me she’d come back to visit and she’d count on me to take care of her daughters the way I took care of my sisters, and the way I took care of her, when she fainted.

  “I promised her—I swore to her on the wishing rock—that I would do that.

  “Take care of her daughters.

  “Take care of you.”

  Twenty-five

  Take care of my daughters, Mom had asked. She tried to make certain Ella and I would have a second family, at Cameron Hall. Gib had saved her life—and by extension, mine, too. I wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for him.

  “What are you thinking?” Gib asked. “I didn’t tell you the story of that weekend to make you more unhappy. But you don’t look happy at all right now.”

  Maintaining control was critical. Here was a man who was man enough to share a stunning, intimate story with undemanding sentiment in his eyes and his voice set in the earthy cadence of a parish priest reciting a workingman’s mass. I loved simplicity as much as I loved the complex elegance of music. Music was nothing without its silences.

  I took a deep breath. “Thank you for telling me about it. I just need a second to recover. I’m sitting here where my mother almost drowned, and you’ve told me a story I never heard before. Pop never talked about it.”

  “Does it help you understand that I want to remember your father kindly?” he asked. “That I’d like nothing better than to put aside what he did later on?”

  “Can you do that?”

  “You’ll never know—and neither will I, nor anyone else—whether he meant to associate with killers or not, whether he knew what his friends intended or not. I can only tell you that you’ll be judged on your own merits here, and nothing but. You and Ella.”

  I didn’t say so, but I knew I’d have to defend Pop one way or another for the rest of my life. Maybe Mom worried that he would need more help than other men to keep his path straight. “He adored my mother. He worried about her. She had a weak heart,” I said. “A heart valve that didn’t close right. And the wall of her heart was thin in one spot.”

  Gib, who had leaned forward with his elbows on his knees, turned his head to look at me. “You’re saying she had a congenital problem? It caused her to faint here?”

  “Maybe. Her heart is what killed her. Heart failure while she was under anesthesia during a hysterectomy. Pop always said she thought she’d die young.”

  “That may be so, but there could be another explanation for why she fainted that day.”

  “What?”

  “She was already pregnant with you.”

  After a long moment, I nodded. “She always told me I was born nine months after she and Pop got married here, but it was actually eight months. Maybe she just didn’t want me to worry that Pop only married her because she admitted she was pregnant.”

  “I don’t buy the idea that he felt forced to marry her. I think he admitted how much he loved her that day.”

  “I know he loved her.”

  “Try to keep in mind that your mother had a lot of faith in the future. Maybe not her own future, or your father’s, but yours and Ella’s and mine. Try to stop worrying so much and have some faith yourself.”

  “You think I’m cynical for no good reason?”

  “No, a lot of people have let you down. Including me.”

  “You? No. I had no expectations.”

  “Then why did you keep the rock? And the wedding picture?”

  I was silent. “Why?” he persisted.

  “Because I liked to believe in you.”

  “Then I did let you down. I should have come after you years ago. You and Ella. I knew more about your father’s arrest than most people. I could have found you, if I’d wanted to.”

  I faced forward, staring blindly into the forest. “Thanks for the honesty.” I straightened automatically, trying to keep a show of pride.

  “I’m sorry,” he said wearily. “I had a career to think about. There were friends you could have turned to. I thought you would. You disappeared too fast for me to have a chance.”

  “I didn’t know who to trust.”

  “So you’re human. You don’t have to explain anymore.”

  “Fine. Neither do you.”

  “Yes, I do.” He paused. “I was only about twenty-six. First-year rookie. And I lived and breathed for my work. I’d been meant for it since that day here at the spring, when I learned how it felt to keep someone else from dying or getting hurt. I didn’t want to risk losing my career. Plus I didn’t want to hurt my family’s reputation. Simon and Min had finally turned the Hall into a success. A moneymaker.”

  Who was I to be disappointed by his failings, when I had my own to consider? “I doubt I’d have trusted you enough to accept your help,” I managed. “By then I’d learned not to trust anybody. Particularly if you were with the government. I still feel that way about government agents.”

  “I’m the government. You’re the government. Every citizen of this country is the government. Your father only had legitimate reason to blame the people who made the Asian American policies when he was a boy, and the people on the street who treated him like dirt because he was mixed-race. That’s not ‘the government.’ ”

  “Then I’ll tell you what the government is. It’s men who come into a house with two teenage girls who don’t have an attorney yet, and they call in some beefy women in uniforms who take the underage girl to a juvenile jail because there’s no adult supervision in the house, and then they push the older girl around—literally push her into corners and yell at her and threaten to arrest her. It’s men who smile while they’re pawing through your lingerie or your high-school yearbooks or your jewelry box. Or personal diaries. It’s men old enough to be a father to you, men who are dressed well and supposed to be upstanding defenders of justice and the American way, men who know they can play a little grab-and-tickle with a girl who’s scared and has no one to turn to for help.”

  He sta
red at me, and I watched the effect of my outburst settle in him. “I didn’t learn any of that in my research on you,” he said, in a low voice, and I knew he was shocked. But I didn’t want pity from him, not from him. I wished I hadn’t said a word.

  “They don’t write it up in the official reports,” I said wearily.

  “If you can remember any names, tell me. I’ll locate the bastards for you. I’ll make it possible for you to confront them face-to-face. I can do that for you.”

  “I don’t remember names. What difference does it make now, anyway?”

  “This kind of thing goes on because people won’t talk about it.”

  “No, it goes on because the system is corrupt, and when the government comes down on people who have no money or power, nobody gives a damn about constitutional rights.”

  “That’s not true. A lot of good people care. I care.”

  “Then listen to that tape I gave you. Because obviously music is all I can give you—and all you’ll take from me—without both of us being scared of the future and fighting over the past.”

  We sat in silence for a minute, struggling with the reality of mistakes and regrets. His shoulders hunched, his mouth set in resolute lines, he dropped the white pebble from his hand into mine. Then, in a quiet voice, he said, “You think you can learn to love an ex-government man?”

  I took a deep breath. I wanted so badly for him and his family to recognize the basic decency of me and my family. I wanted so badly to trust him with everything I held dear, the way my mother had.

  The water of the spring was too warm, suddenly. I felt dizzy. But my heart was strong—I wouldn’t let myself end up heartbroken like Mom and Pop. I eased out of the water and sat on the spring’s grassy edge. When Gib reached out to help I drew back instinctively. “I can’t.” He stopped his hand in midair. “It’s nothing personal,” I promised quickly.

  “The hell it’s not,” he said.

  The next morning, around dawn, I walked to the river along an old path cushioned with fallen leaves. I went to the wooden-and-stone gazebo on a bank of ferns overlooking the water, and sank down in a willow chair. I listened to birds sing and the river burble seductively, and I prayed.