by John Okas
“War’s over, eh?” Laudette snickers. “Tell that to the Marines and their mothers! In case you haven’t noticed, the war’s just begun. People are being killed left and right, Keinar. Peace on earth will come when there is good will among ordinary people, not over-confidence among fruity manure artists.”
Keinar smiles weakly and shakes her head. “We cannot root evil and suffering from the world entirely, Sister Laudette. The best we can do is hope that love and freedom retain their edge. The day the Freeway went to war is the day the war was over, where it counts, on the level of causation.”
“Aren’t you the one who was always telling Sugar to lay off the free love or else somebody could get hurt? From what I gather she was back at it.”
“That’s not exactly what happened, Sister Laudette. Sister Bharani-Sarah’s inner eye opened and she became aware that there was a decisive battle between good and evil on the fruited plane. At the same time the Freeway base at Coral Bay was about to be blown to bits. Necessity drove Lord Z to the air. He was trying to alert the Fleet’s commanding officer and at the same time keep all hell from breaking loose beyond the beyond. The Sharp Shooter’s signal was picked up by a couple of Uncle Sam’s radio operators who happened to be having a few beers on duty. Mistaking friend for foe, confusing the cryptic blips and bleeps on the screen with an enemy message, they scrambled the signal they were picking up with a new device that uses radio waves as offensive weapons. The Sage got jammed, and his soul vehicle, smoking and on fire, plunged down into the Deep Blue Sea. There he floundered, disoriented, bent out of shape. Double F, of course, notified Sister Bharani-Sarah through her newfound clairvoyance and appointed her liaison on the mission. Since the dogs of the dead, now gone to war, listen to her, as medium she could act as go-between and get them to deliver Lord Z safely from harm, although at probable risk to herself.
“She said her prayers while Brother Harry slept next to her. A body was called for to save a body. She was only too happy to give up her own life. She sincerely believed that by calling Lord Z, the only person she could doom was herself. And there was Brother Harry, lying in the bed, feeling happy and satisfied; his mind was open to Sister Bharani-Sarah. The Cause that was calling her called him and Brother Harry, a gentleman, volunteered to make the sacrifice, not because he loved his country but because he loved his wife.”
“Sir Harry knew what he was in for?” Laudette asks. “I doubt that.”
“Well, maybe not consciously,” replies Keinar, “but in his blood, in his bones, he was highly aware. It was his fondest dream to make Sister Bharani-Sarah happy, even if it meant offering himself up to die and freeing her to go with another man. What greater wisdom is there to know when one’s time is at hand? And what greater love has any man than to give himself selflessly? In the end Brother Harry did have the happiest ending a man can, dying in love’s sweet embrace. And because of his self-sacrifice, we have won a victory in the battle of the fruited plane. Reichmann’s rotten apples have been defeated. The Nastis and the Kimrakazis will fail. East and West shall indeed meet in peace.”
“It was Harry’s fate, Miss Lord,” Sarah speaks at last. “Not my fault or Lord Z’s, but just a matter of what was necessary at the time. Harry lived his life in dedication to the flesh. Physical decline and living without my love was a fate worse than death for him, so he chose death. Now Harry is enjoying a garden of unearthly delights. Not so My Sweet Lord. He has pulled through, but he is still badly scrambled. Electromagnetic jam is sticky and slow coming off.”
Keinar adds, “You see, Sister Laudette, with the development of radar, extending bodies is riskier business than ever before. Z is down, off the air, and back to the visible range of the spectrum. He is in his human body for the rest of his days, living like an ordinary old man in the mountains.”
Sarah cuts in breathlessly, “But now with his broadcast career over he has regained the ability to love in a simple, human way and I can go with him, and live happily, if not forever after, maybe for a few decades.”
“Are you saying you’re leaving here?” Laudette leans forward, surprised at this last revelation by Sarah.
“Yes, Miss Lord, I am leaving,” Sarah answers. “It’s Lord Z’s desire for all living beings to enter the Light, and it’s my desire to join him where he lives. What do you say, will you take charge of this house? I can only go if you agree to stay on as sitter.”
So far all the explanations have only served to incense Laudette. But now, she hears something that couldn’t make more sense; her appeals to heaven are answered. She can get away from black magic Sugar and not have to give up what she feels is her responsibility for Gloria as well as the worldly things she values: her high-paying job, the comfortable life in the museum. She asks Sarah, “Do you plan on going to the devil for a good while or are you coming back soon?”
“I’m going. I don’t know beyond that. It’s a long journey during troubled times. I don’t expect to be back too soon. And while I’m away you’ll have the final say about this house and Gloria. Will you take the job? There’ll be a substantial increase in salary.”
“Run things however I like? More money?”
“You know I trust you unquestionably.”
Laudette smiles and rubs her hands, delighted, feeling no guilt about the good that has come her way on the ripples caused by Harry’s death. “Then I accept. I welcome the opportunity to set things straight around here,” she says.
Wise-girl Gloria claps her hands and sings, “Lawdy Lord, you’ve got the whole world in your hands!”
“That’s enough, Gloria,” says Sarah.
Gloria blinks with surprise. It’s the first time her mother has ever used a firm tone of voice to her.
“Thank you, Sugar, for backing me up. You hear that, Baby? Can the stupid mouth and have some respect for your elders or else …”
“Or else what?” Gloria hisses softly, and smiles, letting Laudette know she wants to be friends. “I expect my life to be heaven once Mummy’s gone.”
But Laudette does not take the cue to attack Sarah. “You grow up first, there’ll be plenty of time for heaven later,” the sitter says staunchly.
Gloria, however, is always on the look-out for information about the hell in the past. Hoping to make an ally she compliments Keinar, “Ma’am, thank you very much for all those mystical explanations you gave. I feel I really learned something. I don’t get much straight talk around this house.” Then to illustrate the evasiveness she encounters, Gloria, big and tall, faces Laudette, big and wide. “Lawdy, since you’re such an authority on Mummy’s life, in the name of this God of Truth you’re always bragging about, how about filling me in on my father. Tell me what Mummy is hiding from me.”
Laudette was expecting a question about the Z God. She goes white as a sheet, stunned that Gloria has gone back to the roots of the issue. She shrugs her shoulders and says, “Whatever do you mean? I only know what you know, what your mother told me and, you said it, she can be more than a little mixed-up.”
“Mummy?” She squares off on Sarah.
“Your fa-fa-fatha-tha?” Sarah’s lips go flibberty-gibberty.
“You see, Ma’am. When I try to find out about my father, Lawdy refuses to discuss him and Mummy goes nuts.”
Banking on the fact that her mother’s tongue is frozen, and that the medium is there to mediate, Gloria stoops to blackmail. “All right Lawdy, I thought you wanted to stay on. Mummy gave me the choice of staying here with you or going to boarding school. I chose to stay here because I thought you were my friend and I wanted to see you keep your position, but friends don’t keep secrets from friends, do they? So if you want all this friendliness to continue, tell me the secret or else I will go to boarding school and you can get out and collect unemployment insurance.”
“You wouldn’t!”
“I might!”
“Why of all the ungrateful, spiteful little—.” Unable to face the shocked, speechless Sarah, Laudette turns to Keina
r, “This girl needs somebody to be strong with her. That’s really where I failed. When you’re no longer useful to her she turns on you.” The big ex-sitter gets up to leave rather than betray her promise, but when Sarah doesn’t stop her she slows down her exit pace so she can talk it over with herself out loud. “So, Laudette, I guess you’ll be moving back home to Kingsborough after all. And tomorrow you’ll have to go down to the domestic help agency and see if you can get a new baby to sit for …”
She needn’t go on much more for Keinar to come to her rescue. The small medium gets up, puts an end to the soliloquy, and leads her back to the table. This time, when Keinar talks, Laudette listens with gratitude rather than contempt.
“Sister Laudette, say I knew something that a certain someone else wanted to know, and I didn’t make any promises not to tell her. And say there was someone who did make a promise never to talk about this something, but that person could do something for me. Do you think it would be all right for me to say, ‘Let’s make a deal, you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours’?”
“That would be one way of putting it.” Laudette smiles, seeing that Keinar is going to try getting her off the hook.
“Well, I will tell Gloria what she wants to know on two conditions. First, you agree to stop condemning Sister Bharani-Sarah for what happened to her husband, and second, you tell Gloria what you saw in Sister Bharani-Sarah’s bedroom the first day I came to this house.”
Laudette nods her agreement. They all look to Sarah for approval, and she sheds a tear, and nods stiffly, unable to speak.
“Sugar, forgive me for all the bad things I said about you,” Laudette says. “Now that I hear it this way, and I realize how much Sir Harry enjoyed all the fruity trappings, I see things a little differently. It’s just that you seemed so carefree about him dying. And what a fine gentleman Sir Harry was! You were lucky to have him.”
Sarah tips her head, apparently accepting both Laudette’s apology and observations.
Now Laudette turns to Gloria, “Now I’ll tell you what I’ve seen. I’ve tried to sit on it, died a thousand deaths trying to deny it, but it’s all going to come out of the bag now anyway. I might as well tell what I saw. I did see this awful monkey monster once or twice in this house, in the bedroom …”
“Really, Lawdy? No kidding?” Gloria says, blinking, looking back and forth from Keinar, to Laudette, to her mother. “Not just the evil in your mind, but a real being? You can’t fool me. You’re joking, right? You’d agree to anything just to get this business about my father behind you.”
All along, when Laudette denied it, Gloria believed there was more to the story than the sitter would acknowledge. She always found Laudette’s denial of belief in the core experience of the fruit and nut meetings totally transparent. Now that her sitter openly concedes that she did see something materialize, Gloria has an equally hard time swallowing it. Indeed the truth sounds like its opposite.
Laudette shrugs with discomfort and says, “Baby, I’m not pulling your leg. I saw a monster that looked like a bamboon of some kind, swinging into this house from out of nowhere. And an uglier monkey it would be hard to find! Ugh! It wasn’t exactly flesh and blood; it was kind of like a moving picture. But he could do things no movie could, if you know what I mean.”
“You really believe there is something that has a body like an animal or a man and can take to the air and travel around this world?”
“Well, I don’t know if I believe in it,” Laudette says. “But yes, I did see it, the Gospel as my witness.”
Keinar smiles at Gloria, “You know Sister Laudette would never tell a lie.”
Gloria does not consider either the medium or her mother as a reliable source of information. Nine times out of ten Madam Keinar is drunk, and her mother, mentally disturbed, has myths and facts all mixed up. But Laudette’s admission causes Gloria more than ever to question her own doubts about the existence of the Z God. “I know you’re not one for lying, Lawdy. But this? It does give me something to think about. But first,” says Gloria leaning now toward Keinar, “I want Madam Keinar to keep her promise and tell me about my father.”
The Blanks in Black Family History
“Originally, your mother’s last name was Blanche and she was the peach of Zion Beehive,” says Keinar, true to her word, filling the Bee in on the blanks in Black family history. “Although she was the daughter of the Prophet’s Bookkeeper, Jeremiah, and seemed a model of piety and feminine virtue, in private she was a freethinker, building a library of poetry, art books, and humanist essays. When she was seventeen she had a secret love affair with your father. He was no Cornie Duke the Third, but an underdog, a mixed breed, part white, part black, part brave, part coyote, a free spirit named Corn Dog.”
“Corn Dog! That name can’t be real!” Gloria laughs, but when she sees Laudette smirk knowingly and her mother’s eyes deepen with tears, she quickly understands that it is.
“When your mother revealed to her father that she was pregnant and by whom, her father threatened to get a lynch mob on Corn Dog for corrupting her. Corn Dog had to make a hasty exit from Zion. Your mother, frightened and pregnant, promised to meet him in the City by the Bay in the spring after you were born. She stayed behind to absorb your grandfather’s wrath. Jeremiah didn’t chase the buck but burned her books and put her on the blacklist. When you came, you went on the blacklist right beneath her. When she could, your mother packed you up, changed her name to Black and left for the coast, but she got sidetracked and spent all summer working as a model, posing for men with money.”
“You mean—?”
“Yes. Now, now, she did what she had to do to take care of you.”
Gloria is quite surprised, but not unpleasantly. Unorthodox to the core, she is actually quite impressed that her mother was once a professional woman.
“Your mother finally did go to the Bay Area, but your father, a child of nature, had run afoul of the city life. He had no choice but to leave town for a while. She had no choice but to go into the only business she knew.”
“Mummy!”
“Then one day, months and months later, out of the blue, your father showed up, while your mother had her hands full with a customer. He entered the apartment, dressed up in an ice cream man’s suit and said ‘Here I am!’ Certainly, a very confusing situation for a young lady on her own to be in. At first she took him in, but then the police came. Your father was an incorrigible romantic and had stolen an ice cream truck just because he was sentimental about ice cream. For your mother, business was business. She made the mistake of letting it come first. She threw him out. The police took him into custody and your mother denied knowing him when they came to question her.
“Of course she soon had a change of heart. But not before the authorities had taken your father away. What happened next, whether he was trying to escape, resisting arrest, or was railroaded, are things we’ll never know for certain, but we suspect the latter. He never made it to the station. He was struck dead somewhere en route by a cable car.”
So there it is, out at last, the bitter pill.
Sarah now begins to cry freely, but she raises her head and lets her teary eyes meet Gloria’s. The Bee, remembering her Daddy-o, knows the feeling of loss death can inflict on the living. Her own eyes, too, brim with tears. Sharing grief is the only reason for other people. “Oh, Mummy!”
“Needless to say,” says Keinar, “your mother has been miserable about it ever since. She couldn’t help but think that had she protected him to begin with, or, when the police had him under arrest and brought him back to her to identify, admitted she knew him, and went with him to the station with money to bail him out, your father would probably still be alive today.
“The Bay Area police and the Golden Gate security force might have something to hide,” the medium concludes, “but now no longer does anyone in this house. It’s no sugar-coating to say that what your mother did was an accident. After all, she was not much older than you
are now, spinning her heels on the wheel of fortune.”
Gloria had suspected for some time that the black widow’s link to her father’s death was more tangible, easier to point a finger at than her connection to her stepfather’s. She feels more sorry for her mother than ever, and at the same time, contrary to Sarah’s worst fears, Gloria has no inclination to judge her harshly. “Of course, you should have stood by him, Mummy, but he should have had enough sense not to go around stealing trucks to show he loved you. The way I see it, life is a play. Is that the way my father saw it? It’s what Daddy-o believed. If I were you, I wouldn’t be too hard on myself.”
“That’s easier said than done, Gloria dear,” Sarah says. “I betrayed the man I loved, and it was the last thing that ever happened between us.”
“Yes, Mummy,” Gloria says, putting her tan arm around the white goddess, “and I’ve know what hell you’ve gone through. But don’t torture yourself anymore on my account. I loved Daddy-o so much, I couldn’t have loved my real father more.”
Sarah smiles thinly and takes Gloria’s other hand, grateful her daughter understands.
Three weeks later, on the eve of Xmas Sarah gives Kitty and Shepp the night off and in a rare appearance in the kitchen prepares the Feast of Light dinner for her family. She slices the loaves and fixes the fishes of tradition and passes them around to Gloria and Laudette.
And after the sugarplum pudding, the three, mother, daughter, and Laudette Lord, each calling herself accountable to a separate higher power, join in a hug to say goodbye to life as they know it.
Postmarks
Matter is energy, energy is love, love is magic.
Insulated by magic, Sarah goes neutral through a war-torn world on a Mercy International freighter marked with a red cross, leaving Gloria home to contemplate all she heard the night Keinar was over for dinner.
At last I know the truth about my father. I’m sure he was a fine brave man, and what happened to him was certainly a tragedy. But if he knew anything at all about Mummy it should have been what a nervous wreck she could be, and what a coward! He should have known better than to pop in on her so unexpectedly. As for Mummy being a prostitute, I don’t think that was bad at all. I don’t see why if a girl’s got to support herself, she shouldn’t do whatever deal makes the most sense for her, either all in a lump as in marriage, or going freelance here and there, wherever the action is.