Belladonna

by Moline, Karen

  Most important, Mr. Lincoln went on, was that we were forbidden to ask any questions of any houseguests there might be. He told us a man named Henry Hogarth would be his liaison. And he left us, for nearly three and a half years. The war ended and the world heaved a sigh of relief. Hogarth, a dapper small man with darting eyes, dropped in without warning from time to time. His nearly bald head was shaped like a hard-boiled egg, and he favored mahogany brown fedoras or jaunty red berets to cover it. But mostly I remember his skintight black leather gloves, his paisley silk handkerchiefs, and his brilliantly white silk scarf flamboyantly thrown over one shoulder. He’d watch us scrape plaster from the walls, then brush imaginary dust off the sleeves of his Kilgore French Stanley suit with a horrified flick, and leave again.

  Once the war was over we no longer feared invasion, and Matilda’s cooking gradually improved as more food became available. Slowly we healed, physically at least. I suppose you may well be asking yourself why we didn’t try to leave, why we chose to remain hidden in the forest to lick our wounds. Look at it this way: The traumatic shame and humiliation and perplexity of our reality ran deeper than the cut itself. We decided to stay as servants, not yet ready to face the world, and servants we would remain. Until I would have one of my hunches and know that the time was ripe for change. I wondered from time to time if my hunches had disappeared with my manhood. The energy to fight had left us, you see. As well as the energy to dream.

  And so we painted the walls and gilded the banisters, gardened, read. I devoured books from the immense library we found crated in the basement and moved, box by box, upstairs to the shelves we built. I filled my head with words and facts and experiences I’d never dreamed of in Bensonhurst, gulping down volume after volume in a vicarious stupor as each day and month melted into the next. We tried not to eat too much, and to stay fit, because we were starting to run to fat. We had wild mood swings. We moped; we raged. We got drunk on the bottles of Haut Brion we found moldering in the wine cellar. The bleeding had long since stopped, but not the pain of loss, and the weirdness within that had changed us so. It’s not that I don’t think every man ought to have a bit of the feminine in him, to have the sensitivity of quick and delicate feelings, but no man ought to be effeminate if it is not his choice.

  Matteo was no coward, but he had always been as desperately shy and unsure as I was full of the braggadocio of youth and virility. He’d taken life much more seriously than any of our gang. Already glutted with my share of women"in fact, I’d been as insatiable as a bull let loose in a field of heifers"I used to tease Matteo unmercifully that he was the only Guido in Italy who never got laid. Slow to conversation in any language, he’d been embarrassed by his broken Italian; I, on the other hand, had used it to my advantage to seduce the local maidens who thought we’d come from Hollywood, not Bensonhurst. How ironic that we were raised in Brooklyn, and were probably the only Americans dumb enough to go visiting cousins in the home country in late 1939. I’m not sorry my streetwise cockiness quickly got us hooked up with the partisans"until we were caught, that is. Sometimes, in my dreams, I have flashes of memory: of the feel of a woman’s flesh as she squirmed and moaned in pleasure beneath me, the ravenous gluttony of physical satiation. Matteo has nothing but pain and silence, and for that, I blame myself.

  That was when we met Belladonna.

  There’s nothing to add about that encounter. I told you about it already, so don’t ask me to elaborate now. No no no, you’re going to have to wait for more.

  There is a very long silence when I finish my tale. Matteo barely seems to breathe, he is sitting so still and looking so forlorn. Annabeth has been in tears since I first mentioned Mr. Lincoln, and even the imperturbable Jack looks stunned.

  Annabeth wipes her tears away and gets up to go over to Matteo. She kneels down next to him and tries to take his hand, but he pulls it back. “Don’t push me away, Matteo, please,” she begs. “I don’t care what happened to you. It doesn’t matter, truly. You’re the bravest, the sweetest, the most wonderful man, and I love you the way you are. So do Marshall and Charlotte. You’ve become part of our family, and we need you.”

  Two tears trickle in a slow straight path down Matteo’s cheeks as he stares down at his shoes. I feel her presence and look up to see Belladonna watching us from the shadows. She shakes her head ever so slightly, so I look away, back at my brother.

  Annabeth leans over and cups Matteo’s face with her hands, tracing his tears with her thumb before wiping them away. “Come home with me now,” she says gently. “Please. Can you take the night off? Darling, please. I need to be with you tonight.”

  “Go,” I say, “Geoffrey will be thrilled to be in charge.”

  Annabeth stands up and holds out her hands. Matteo looks at her eyes shining with love and tenderness, and two more tears spill out of his own. It is all I can do not to burst out sobbing, sentimental softy that I am. I glance over to the shadows and see that Belladonna has disappeared.

  Matteo looks at me and I try to smile at him, and he leaves with Annabeth.

  “I’m sorry, Tomasino,” Jack says eventually.

  “Thank you, but you don’t need to say anything,” I tell him.

  “May I ask you one thing?” he asks, and I nod. “What about your family? Do they know you’re here? Do you want me to check for you?”

  “That’s very kind,” I reply, trying to blow my nose with some dignity, “but they were told we’re dead. Besides, our father died in 1944, and our mother died two years ago. We had someone ask, just to be sure. I don’t think we could face the rest of them. Not after all this time. It’s easier for them, this way.”

  “Would you like photographs, just to see them?”

  Yes, I want to scream, but I don’t. I can’t think about them. Nor can Matteo. We’ve blocked it all out: our past, our childhood and home, our other brothers and sisters and cousins and the whole noisy lot. About what we used to be.

  “Belladonna is our family now,” I say.

  “I understand,” Jack says, and leaves me to sit in the empty room with the ghosts of what made me.

  Another steamy night in the club, and we are rather desultorily spooning our gin and tonic sorbets, the summertime special, out of silver bowls. No one around us is remotely interesting, and Belladonna is in a foul mood.

  I can hardly blame her. The waiting game is not fun anymore. Not even for me, with my boundless capacity to enjoy the silliness and stupidity of the thousands who’ve stepped through the mirrored gateway into the Club Belladonna.

  “I woke up and couldn’t remember what happened yesterday, not even anything Bryony said,” Belladonna frets. “What does that say about me?”

  “All it says is that you didn’t do anything particularly worth remembering.”

  A new group of guests arrives, and after avid, pointed nods in our direction, start loudly gossiping, trying and failing to prove to us that they are worldly sophisticates.

  “Married men are always safe to chase,” says a woman, “but it so annoys their wives.”

  “Safe only because they’re already married, you mean,” a man retorts, “and you’re spared the horror of having to live with them.”

  How true, I think, looking at the man, whose shoulders slope so steeply his shape resembles a wine bottle. His cheeks are as florid as a glass of cabernet, and his date’s face is powdered as white as a stalk of asparagus grown in a cellar. They look like a nightmare version of Snow White and Rose Red.

  “What a shock to contemplate"sober sex,” he goes on. “Why, I’d completely forgotten that all my nerve endings could work. What terror! Frankly, I don’t know if I could cope with it more than once every five years or so. Why, people say the most extraordinary things when they don’t have any clothes on. Plus you can see everything so clearly. Honestly, you don’t mind so much about the face if the rest is all right. Or is it the other way around?”

  Snow White yawns widely.

  “Am I boring you?” he ask
s.

  “Not yet, Ronald darling, but I’m sure it won’t be long now. You are horribly rude,” Snow White retorts, patting his cheek a little too hard, “but I like that in a man. It’s so endearing. Be sure to tell everyone about your new lover.” She eyes the table. “She’s half his age, double his height, with twice his stamina. Isn’t that sweet?” Then she excuses herself to sashay off to the ladies’ room.

  Ronald watches her leave, then shrugs. “Isn’t her hair lovely? Such a marvelous color, and it takes only a tiny bit of dye to get it that way.”

  “She was an amazing child prodigy,” someone else says.

  “My dear Dorothy, child prodigies stay seventeen until they’re at least twenty-five,” Ronald says.

  “Like Dulcie,” Dorothy says. “Did you hear what the oil tycoon did to her?”

  “No,” everyone at the table coos. “Do tell.”

  “Well,” Dorothy says, batting her alarmingly fake eyelashes to see if I’m listening, “the tycoon invited her to dinner, and his butler let her in and took her to the dining room, telling her the tycoon would be right there. He poured her a drink and left, so she started gulping down the caviar. All of a sudden, she heard a dog barking from under the table"and there was her tycoon, his face made up like a dog, a dog collar around his neck, with a leash attached to the table leg. He barked again, then started whining that he was hungry and he wanted her to throw him some food.”

  “What did she do?” Ronald asks.

  “She didn’t know what to do, so she left!” says Dorothy. “What a fool! If she’d played her cards right, she could have gotten much more out of the evening than a few spoonfuls of caviar.”

  Dorothy’s right. She should have taken the tycoon out for a walk. And then she should have tied him to a tree and left him there to bark for all the neighbors to see.

  “Men like that don’t pay for sex. They pay women to leave,” Ronald says. “They have a lot more respect for the women they do pay.”

  “What about women who pay men?” asks Dorothy. “Gina de Lorenzo is seventy-eight, and her new boyfriend is forty-one. His mother said Gina should adopt him.”

  “Gina is a nymphomaniac,” Ronald states.

  “Every woman who likes sex is a nympho to you, dearest,” croons Snow White as she returns to the table. “It’s all about conquest, dearest Ronnie. But I’ve found that the great conquerors usually can’t get it up.” She smiles broadly. “I think all impotent men should be thrown off a cliff. If they were, the world would be a much nicer place for us. I’d never go to bed with a man who couldn’t get it up. It’s immoral not having sex if you’re sharing the same bed.”

  “Julius says he can have sex only once a month,” says one of the women, “when there’s a full moon.”

  All this talk of sex is beginning to annoy me. Frankly, I’m sure most of these alleged sexual sophisticates go home and either read the Kinsey Report for kicks or tie on one of Mamie Eisenhower’s little aprons before putting hubby’s dinner in the oven.

  “I want my cousin June here,” Belladonna says to me suddenly. “As soon as possible. I’ve got to do something. I’ve got to feel that something is going to happen.”

  Naturally, just as she says that, Jack joins in. “There’s a bit of a situation outside,” he says, and he tells us what’s happening.

  A long black Cadillac had pulled up near the door, scattering the waiting crowd in the street, and two goons stepped out, straightening their fedoras and their ties in exaggerated gestures. They could have been sent from mobster central for the roles of swaggering hoodlums. Matteo stood guard, Andromeda growling softly, before nodding nearly imperceptibly to Geoffrey, who switched on the microphone. Our shadow bouncers had approached in an ever-narrowing ring, while the crowd remained frozen and silenced. The mobsters went up to the door, Andromeda barking fiercely.

  “Shut the damn dog up,” one of them said.

  “I beg your pardon?” asked Geoffrey.

  “Shut the damn dog up, I said. Mr. Bonaventura is coming in.”

  “Do I take it,” Geoffrey replied with icy calm, “that neither of you is Mr. Bonaventura?”

  “Get off it,” said the other, pushing back his jacket to reveal his shoulder holster. “Mr. Bonaventura wants to come in, and Mr. Bonaventura gets what he wants.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah, it’s so.”

  They hadn’t realized yet that the entire conversation in all its eloquence was being broadcast to the crowd on the street, including the police, who were eating their sandwiches in their cars on each corner.

  “Why, sir,” Geoffrey drawled, “I do believe that’s a gun you’re flashing at me. Do you have a permit to carry such a formidable weapon, or am I just a lucky boy tonight?”

  There was a nervous ripple of laughter.

  “Quit stalling,” the first goon said.

  “But Andromeda is afraid of guns,” Geoffrey replied. Before they knew what hit them, both goons were flat on their backs, their own guns pointed at their heads by the nimble fingers and superior skills of Matteo and Geoffrey. The crowd applauded as the police snapped cuffs on the cursing goons and hauled them away.

  You could hardly imagine that Mr. Bonaventura himself was, at this point, a very happy bunny. But to everyone’s surprise, he got out of his shiny black car, said a few words to his driver, who seemed to be arguing with him, and slowly approached the door. He was walking with a cane, just as Leandro had done, although there was no nobility in this Italian’s face.

  Jack had come out to join his trusted sentinels at the door, and there was a brief consultation. “It may be useful,” Matteo said. “He may be Bonifacio Bonaventura, but he’s not gotten this powerful by being as foolish as his bodyguards.”

  By the time Mr. Bonaventura reached the door, you could have heard a pin drop on the street. Even the cops preparing to haul the goons away were watching in surprise.

  “Good evening,” he said.

  “Good evening, sir, and welcome to the Club Belladonna,” Geoffrey replied. Andromeda, our obedient darling, remained silent as she had been instructed, her tail wagging. “Please, do come in.”

  Mr. B. nodded and strolled in. Jack hurried down the passageway to Belladonna and me while Mr. B., like everyone else, paid the entrance fee and checked his coat and hat. Josie looked questioningly at Matteo, but when he nodded, Mr. B. was allowed to keep his cane.

  Jack meets Mr. B. at the end of the mirrored hallway and bows slightly. “Belladonna would be most honored if you would join her,” he says.

  Mr. B. is small and as dark as a Havana cigar butt, with the eyes of a sturgeon, I decide as he sits down at our table. Jack slides in next to him. Not what I’d call an attractive package, but I am not the one to judge any man’s appearance, am I? Of course I am.

  “I am ravished with delight that you could join us tonight,” Belladonna says coolly to Mr. B., waving her fan at one of the waiters. “How might I make your visit as enjoyable as possible?”

  The clubgoers are rapt and hushed, watching them. Everyone knows who Mr. B. is. Everyone’s scared to death he’s going to whack them right here in the Club Belladonna. They’re forgetting whom he’s talking to.

  “I think you know what I want,” he says.

  “No, I don’t believe I do,” Belladonna replies, her face stony under the mask.

  “I prefer to speak to you in private,” he says.

  “This is my private table. Consider yourself cut off from the rest of the world.” And then, slipping into Italian, she adds, “We may speak in this language if you prefer.”

  She points her fan in my direction. “This is Tomasino, my personal manager, and Jack, who is in charge of security. Jack is not very fluent in Italian, so he won’t be able to understand exactly what we’re saying.” No matter, he’s savvy enough to figure it out himself.

  That’s what happens when you hire the best.

  Mr. B.’s sturgeon eyes narrow a little bit more. He is not amused
.

  “So, caro mio,” Belladonna says brightly, “after that spectacular display outside, I am assuming your proposition is one of the utmost urgency.”

  Mr. B. frowns. This is not going according to plan. Belladonna does not fit the mold of the kind of women in Mr. B.’s rather particular, limited orbit.

  A waiter comes by with a bottle of Dom Pérignon. “Thank you, Charles,” she says after he pours Mr. B. a glass, and she beckons him closer. “Charles, Mr. Bonaventura has been discussing the quality of our staff with me. I believe he would like to see your papers.”

  Mr. B. looks perplexed. No no no, I am not impressed with him at all. This is the difference between Jack and men like Mr. B. Jack possesses that rare quality of stillness, of trained instincts and quick intelligence, of visual perspicacity. Of eyes in the back of his head, and a nose to ferret out danger. Of a willingness to wait, and plot with careful deliberation. Mr. B. wants what he wants when he wants it, and he wants it now.

  Instant gratification is such a bore!

  Charles flashes his FBI badge, and Mr. B. looks from him to me and Jack, and then to Belladonna. Then he surprises us all by bursting out laughing.

  “You have my sympathy, signora,” he says, toasting her with his glass. “They have beaten me to it. Although you will perhaps have need of my protection to keep you safe from these brutes.”

  “If I do,” she says with a wink, “you shall be the first person I call.” She waves Charles away and the crowd heaves a mass sigh of relief. “So, tell me about your family. And Italia. Where were you born?”

  Jack slips away as they chat, and I pour myself another drink. Mr. B. is talking about the town of Sorrento.

  “I’ve never been there, but whenever I hear ‘Torno a Sorrento’ I wish I were on the first boat over,” Belladonna says.

  “I sing it often,” Mr. B. says, looking surprisingly wistful.

  “Do you like to sing?”

  “Only in my house. I always wanted to be an opera singer.”

  Of course he did. I smelled that one coming, but Belladonna doesn’t miss a beat.