Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

by Jacki Lyden

  The gunman's head whips round at this sexual gibe, and so does Ray's. He grabs the gunman by the arm so that he cannot get to the till, where Ray Junior stands dutifully ready to scoop out the cash. Ray Senior knocks his son's hands away with one arm, goes for the gunman with the other. Their fingers grope in quick mimetic movement, pas de deux, two people caught in a blast of wind. Ray is so much bigger than the gunman that the patrons cannot even see the white fedora. He will flatten the punk in a minute. The crowd is yelling, "Take him, Ray, take him," and "Get his gun away, palooka," when there is a roar that could have come all the way from the war in Korea. It consumes the room and makes a hole in the world. Ray Senior soars away from the gunman, shot through the heart. The gunman winks into the dark, does not collect his hat, vanishes into the altered atmosphere of those who have killed. The gunman follows a map of his own making. Mabel runs after him, throwing a chair into the next world, but it doesn't change time. Ray will be a hero now, or something very like it. Ray Junior stands stunned, too weak to move for a moment, looking numbly at his father and mother. Oh my God, Mabel cries, but God is disposed to do nothing for Ray, not in this human world, and Ray is staring, a thick black line around his iris, at the moment of the greatest determination of his life.

  Oh, Ray, what a dodge you took by dying as you did. You who never aged past fifty, you who never admitted weakness, whose descendants may or may not have loved you. No one ever took your place. Mabel moved crimson hands through auburn hair. A peony petal fell in her mind. A last taste of him, and gone.

  A newspaper photographer takes a picture of them all within an hour or two. I am looking at it now, under banner headlines that read "Murder in Midtown Bar," "Wife and Son Witnesses as Patron Thwarts Robbery. Bandit Flees." Mabel and Dolores are seated together, arms around each other, and their faces look like someone has pushed them down. Their mouths are wreaths of sorrow. Ray Junior is so white that it looks as if someone has taken an eraser to the print and started to rub. There is a picture of the floor. Ray is missing, and around the bloodstains the police have traced a white corpse. The outline is thick and sinuous, the legs astride, the hand thrown up, reminding me of the Great Lakes as they finger into the middle of the country. The space that was Ray is empty, and over the years my mother and grandmother will color it in with pigment after pigment until underneath Ray is a kind of pentimento. They must agree on at least this one thing, that Ray was good, because theirs must be a coherent construct on which to hang the story of a man who gave the finger to destiny one night. And destiny, as it often does, gave the finger right back. Next to that outline on the floor that is Ray, all other men are found wanting, and there is no man who can take the measure of the husband and the father whom they loved and trusted and in whom they shared such perfect faith.

  Not two months later, in September, my mother walked down the aisle with my father, the twenty-foot train of her dress trailing on the floor like a river of dreams soaking into the ground. The invitations had been sent out before the murder, she explained. And Ray Junior's fluttering heart finally froze not long after, quite irretrievably stuck fast where the horror had touched it.

  They found the killers and they let them go. I am now staring at a picture of Philip and Virginia Jaeger. Philip is a twenty-five-year-old ex-soldier turned drifter, small and dainty, who has already done time at San Quentin. Virginia is a graduate of the Missouri State Prison for women, armed robbery. She is ten years older than Philip and sexually aggressive, you can see it, I swear, in the bushiness of her hair. She is taller than he by far, "a good looking woman of about 35" who wears what the Milwaukee Journal calls "an affair of plaid cowboy shirt and bolo tie and boots." Milwaukee detectives, hounded by the daily headlines, have gone to pick them up in Texas, tracing them through a string of gas station robberies and bar holdups all the way from Wisconsin. And the case against them looks concrete, but four witnesses in Milwaukee cannot identify Philip. The hat taken from the bar does not fit him. No one tries it on Virginia.

  Her culpability is my own theory, this Virginia, a woman whose ancient smile at the flashbulbs is somehow familiar. I think of Sheba; I am looking at Virginia. The Milwaukee Journal reports that she jokes with the detectives about the food she ate in Texas, about the motorcycle she and the feline Philip have bought, about the countryside she's seen. The detectives politely address her as ma'am. I can feel her charming them. One of them will later become Milwaukee's thirty-year superintendent of police. I look into Virginia's eyes in the news photograph and I hear her talking, hear her saying, Hey, Phil, let's go cruising. Hey, boys, slide on down and make room for me. Ray honey, come down and get me. I have a secret I'd like to tell. Hey, boys, let's get some action here, something going, something nice. In this photograph I conclude that Philip and Virginia are together more than the sum of their sexual parts, parts they molt and change, like some species of fish. They are people who lived in the netherworld long before my mother descended, people who change form and guise and gender as they please because it pleases them to be protean, to rob, to kill. Slipping through the hands of the Milwaukee detectives is a pair whose indeterminate coupling is like quicksilver; evil not so easily identified. The man and woman are the sexual doubles of each other, and you do not know who you know when you look at them. You do not know who you know when they know each other. Virginia perhaps slips into Philip's hat and jacket and says, Here, I'll do this myself. It is the kind of joke Sheba would play.

  When my mother is delusionally ill, she sometimes plays at being dangerous before she actually becomes dangerous. And the odd thing is that, in a way so utterly unlike her ordinary lively, feminine personality, she loses the idea of gender when she's threatening. Like Virginia, the bandit-mother's demeanor is sexually ambiguous and lethal, feline without masculinity or femininity. I do not know if Philip Jaeger and his comrade in titillation, Virginia, actually murdered Ray almost fifty years ago. I do not know it for a fact, but I believe they did. Perhaps it is time to take their newspaper photograph to a psychic. I would put my money on Virginia. If it is she who is haunting my mother, then I would understand this villainess in a way—escaping the force of law and nature, summoning others to execute her whims, wearing a white fedora before which the unsuspecting are slaughtered. And knowing more than any patron at Gaynor's that a sense of order in the world can be jeopardized because we are never quite exactly who we think we are. That is something the insane and the war-weary know and the rest of us struggle to avoid knowing. I want to flee with this knowledge. I flee when I am sick of myself, devious, bored, lethal. I think of the guises we wear in our ordinary lives, and I consider that perhaps when my mother is sick, Virginia and the past have somehow caught her in the snaking outline of a death on the floor of a tavern.

  Child of the Times

  BY THE TIME I WAS FOURTEEN, religious epiphanies were occurring in our house fairly often, and not only to my mother. I loved Communion because I liked the idea of taking a bite out of Christ Jesus. It in no way diminished his power—it simply felt like payback, teeth on wafer, wine in gullet. I was armed by this tribal ritual, the fallen comrade who has died and given me his vital flesh to live. I also liked the stand-up-and-be-counted part of Communion. I wanted to see who in other households feigned nonchalance until Sunday morning, when they felt the dark waters of oblivion beginning to lap at their heels. In church, we could all go a little crazy. In church, we could all pretend that we were good and would live forever. I especially liked the idea of testifying and evangelism. My teen group was taken into Milwaukee to hear an evangelistic speaker, a Mr. David Wilkerson, who blessed us by touching our forehead if we came up on stage, as I did. He talked about all the juvenile delinquents in New York City and how he personally was saving them. He had arrived from Oklahoma to minister to them and parked his station wagon in the Bronx, where the delinquents had stolen his hubcaps. You could read about his exploits in his book, The Cross and the Switchblade, available in the lobby. Wow, that New Yor
k! Full of juvenile delinquents, Sharks and Jets. I went up on the stage in Milwaukee and testified so that all delinquent New Yorkers might be saved, and that I might be too. Saved for what, who could be sure. Perhaps we were being saved for purity, for order, for the ideal dominion of the next world. I had heard of a Catholic family whose father took them all back to Ireland because of the liberalism of Vatican II, and I applauded this because, after all, they were going somewhere. Meanwhile, Pastor Nordstrom had added guitars to the ten o'clock service, bouncy notes hitting Protestant hearts, played by some hippyish people singing "Where Have All the Flowers Gone." Whatever was awry in the world, whatever failed to conform to our notion of value in Menomenee, and however I had lied or plotted that week, I was redeemed at Dr. Martin Luther Church, with its clean, sunny Communion. "Love," preached Pastor Nordstrom, "is wonderfully simple, and simply wonderful," and he never missed a beat. Pastor Nordstrom's life undoubtedly was wonderfully simple, and you hated him for it. And yet life was changing. Even just standing still in Menomenee you could feel it and hear it. We caught broken notes, distant edgy elegies, as riots broke out in faraway cities, boys next door grew their hair to their shoulders, and the sounds of faith shredding got louder and louder. The war in Vietnam began taking away young men, even in our town, and brides in Menomenee got married barefoot in dresses made of muslin, a natural fiber. With mortality the shape of a mushroom cloud on the horizon, some of my friends' mothers decided to get hip before they turned forty. They bought Beatles albums like Rubber Soul, a record that Leonard Bernstein— stine —had recommended, bobbed their heads like dashboard dolls and swayed from side to side, grooving as they listened to the Milwaukee rock-and-roll station while driving the neighborhood car pool, tapping their wedding rings on the steering wheel. In the distance, Chicago's Grant Park came under siege and riot by hippies just a few years older than I, and Mayor Richard J. Daley said, "The policeman is there to preserve order" and "Shoot to kill" and the Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark died in an ambush of police bullets. But my mother, thank God, was unmoved by the outside world. My mother never pretended to be hip. She was conservative. I would have died of embarrassment if she had been like the other mothers who tried to groove to the words of Nancy Sinatra's "These Boots Are Made for Walkin'." My mother was against personal revolutions in her well life, and of course when she was not well had her own style, which made theirs painfully trivial. And while I liked the Beatles, I felt real passion for cowboy ballads harping of shootouts and I loved Marty Robbins and the West Texas town of El Paso, and a Mexican group named the Sandpipers who sang "Guantanamera," which is about being loved by a man from the land of the palm trees. Yo soy unhombre sincero. I needed an hombre sincero; I didn't see too many in the offing. Meanwhile I strained to hear what the outside world was saying, and talk about it came in as hot and as garbled as if I had been listening to Radio Rebelde from Havana on a shortwave at night. The Doctor, in the very rare moments that I recall him noticing the outside world, spoke of his fears of David Rockefeller and the Trilateral Commission and the international domination of the Jews. I could not follow his line of thought. The only Jewish family in town owned a wonderful old kosher summer resort and the local toy store, gave great mahjong parties for children, and had the best floats in the Menomenee Halloween parade, such as a huge wooden shoe built over a van. The Handelman children waved from the shoe, and later we all played in the two-story float parked in their back yard. That was before the Handelmans gave up on assimilation and sent their children to a Jewish day school in Milwaukee, never to be seen by us again.

  I was beginning a split-level life, as I would think of it for the rest of my high school years. On my miniskirted outside, I wanted the same things the other girls wanted—boys and good grades, the adoration of my friends, the best part I could get in the school play—and after a fashion a few of those things were to come. Inside, I felt eternally odd and restless and bored. I was terrified of not being accepted and uncomfortable with it when I was. I was passing, thinking one day I would never remain here, never wanting to leave the next. I shook my pompons with the pompon squad, feeling both proud and ridiculous. The world was out there and I just knew it; I could taste it, but we were here in Menomenee, where the fireworks display was so unvarying each year that you could set your watch by it. Spangles were followed by imitative sonic booms, followed by the Niagara Falls cascading off a rope, followed by the American flag branded in sulphur into the sky. I resented all the sameness, but I also took huge comfort from it, while being keenly aware that there was only a three-letter difference between comfort and conformity. The outside world had multiple pages that stretched across the equator like an origami chain, each page connected to the next. I wanted to read them. I learned about masturbation from Mary McCarthy's The Group, about illicit sex from Elia Kazan's The Arrangement, until my mother found the books and actually confronted the librarian who'd given them to me. As to my mother, she was well, she seemed healthy, even if her marriage was in an emotional deep freeze, and even so that merely put her in the same camp as lots of other people in town. Still, somewhere I knew my mother was more isolated than all the other mothers could ever be if you put them together. They never shared her imagination, and she was never a joiner. Partly, she was too busy at home. But also, in the real world, she was not an easy confider of her problems, even if she could have readily identified them. She was separated from the charity ladies and golfers not only by her youth and beauty, but by a shy strangeness that she sometimes covered with posturing. She did not have sorority stories to tell about UW-Madison. No one ever asked her about her hospital stays, and even if they had, my mother would have smiled and said that everything was fine. More to the point, she would have allowed herself to believe it.

  I knew my sisters and I were growing up like bumper cars in an arcade—the brakes applied harshly and erratically here, and no brakes or direction at all there, and all the time spinning around and hitting the edges. I felt Kate and Sarah and I were growing up in Ping-Pong trajectories that no one else could follow, perversely desirable because our experience would protect us in dangerous situations. And I had my books, stacks and stacks of them. I kept them beside my bed, hauled them and myself to the library on my bike, and read there for hours until I felt as if I'd emerged as a distinctly different person from the one who had parked at the front door. You could disappear in there; make sure your old self never came back. The Menomenee Library had casement windows and was situated almost like a millhouse between two lakes. Anywhere you sat you could look up from your reading and stare out at either Lac La Jolie or Belle Lac. The library also had a pirate trove of National Geographies, tied in bundles spored with fungus in the basement. Those moldy pages were the world of my curiosity, distant lands under dust and smelling of linen. On the second floor of the building was a museum of molting fauna, in which one-eyed animals gave Cyclopean roars and forgotten baskets held ossified bits of pots and Menomenee, Fox, Blackhawk, Chippewa, and Winnebago arrowheads. The library was a perfect temple, guarded by winged griffins. The griffins, bronzed black with age, had once stood before an old hotel in Menomenee where Abraham Lincoln had allegedly stayed. The hotel was then turned into a convent for beautiful old nuns who wafted through the white columns outside the building in full habit, like parasails out for a stroll. I rode my bike between the columns, thinking they would be there as long as the Parthenon. In the new epoch for religious reform and self-empowerment sweeping America in the sixties, the convent was torn down, beginning an ecstatic appetite for architectural destruction in which Menomenee participated with avidity. The griffins wound up at the old library before it too vanished like the convent. History was its own target. Demolition became the town religion, the vainglorious side of civic virtue. From the destruction of the fields and farms rose something as efficient and bland as white cotton underwear. Each quirky thing—the mullioned and gabled old library, the Gothic fish hatchery, the doddering great hotel, the ol
d lake road, the mansions, the European bridge between La Jolie and Belle Lac, and eventually even the lakes themselves—were as threatened as they were to me beloved. Menomenee turned its back on its charms, tore up all the farms, and a few of the farmers became real estate agents and cornfield developers driving shiny Buicks, not weather-beaten pickups. It was anything for a tax break. Menomenee went after history as if it were giving off a bad odor.

  It was in the old library that I came up with the idea of running away. I thought I would shave off my hair, get dark glasses, and take a boy's name. Gus—a name belonging to highways. I thought that if I looked like a boy, I could get pretty far on the Greyhound bus before anyone got wind of the fact that I was a girl. I would go to Red Cloud, Nebraska, where Willa Cather wrote in her journal that "our necessities are so much stronger than our desires." The plot for running away was laid out in a library book about a fourteen-year-old girl who does just that. The problem was that the novel gave few clues about how this girl might sustain herself. Her ruse seemed to work chiefly because absolutely no one challenged her disguise, and she seemed to have more savoir faire than I could ever have dreamed of, had I known what that term meant at the time. Running away was Holly Golightly, Huck Finn and Jim, the circus's Toby Tyler. I knew running away was a fantasy, but even so I started saving my baby-sitting and church money. One Sunday, singing with the church choir with whom I occasionally had a very tremulous and earnest solo, the offering plate was left unattended in Pastor Nordstrom's office. I raided the plate for about thirty dollars and waited for a lightning bolt to strike me right down to hell. I felt driven by necessity, convinced that I was more deserving of the collection that day than anyone, including Christ Jesus, who'd understand and want me to have it. I put the cash theatrically in my trainer bra, size 28AA, utterly self-conscious. The powerful attraction of religious fervor is righteous justification in the face of overwhelming evidence of one's shortcomings. I have made a specialty of such fervor in the countries in which I have traveled. I have seen reason vanquished, and I have no illusions about it happening anywhere, anywhere at all.