Godmother Night

by Rachel Pollack

  That night she thought of telling Melissa about the child and the bones. But what if Melissa got upset with her? And more, what if Melissa asked why she had to go to that one place to get her plants? Melissa probably knew better than Kate that Phytolacca Americana grew all about the Northeast. How far could Kate push intuition as an answer? So instead, Kate talked about Grandma and Grandpa Lang, who had recently amazed Kate, and especially Laurie, by joining an organization called “Grandparents of Lesbians and Gays.”

  “That’s so sweet,” Melissa said.

  “Well, it’s certainly better late than never.”

  “Do they call it GLAG? It sounds like someone choking.” Melissa laughed, the sound Kate loved most in the world. “I can’t imagine Willie joining a parents’ group. He will never condemn anything, whether I go with men or women. But support? Actually, I must say he seems to like you very much.”

  “Really?” Kate said.

  “Oh, he’ll never come out and say so, but I’ve noticed a certain affectionate tinge to his sarcasm. Oddly, I don’t think it’s because you saved his life.”

  “I’m not sure I’d agree with that description.”

  “How could you argue it? But I suspect it’s too big a thing for him to think about. If I’m reading him correctly, what he really likes about you, besides your good taste in art, of course, is your nerve.”

  “Well, thanks,” Kate said. “And how about his daughter? Is that what you like about me? My nerve?”

  “I like all your nerves. And your arteries and your capillaries and your follicles and your cartilage—” Kate laughed. “And especially your gorgeous heart’s blood flowing through all of it.”

  Kate found her next workshop difficult to sustain. She would lose her concentration or even want to joke just when she needed to bear down on their fears or expectations. She herself feared only one thing during the weekend, that someone might ask her to do a healing and she would have to descend from the light of Melissa into the black hole of some stranger’s death. Finally, the workshop ended and Kate could flee her students’ devotion and fly to the town where Melissa lived, a place Kate thought she would think of always as the Heavenly City.

  Melissa lived in an apartment converted from the top floor of a former mansion across the river from the college where she taught. From the living room, they could look out at stone buildings designed to look hundreds of years older than the people who built them. With all the students and teachers safely hidden by distance and trees, the college looked both elegant and cold, like a cemetery for rich people. As they came up to her door, Melissa told Kate, “I wanted to carry you over the threshold, but I’m afraid you just didn’t give me enough time to lift weights in the gym.”

  Despite the building’s former grandeur, the rooms surprised Kate with their smallness. “Rich people were smaller then,” Melissa told her. “Or perhaps our lives have gotten so big nothing can contain us.” Kate admired the contrasts of Melissa’s decorating style, the single extravagance of a green velvet settee with gilded legs set against the clear lines and grained wood of country furniture, her lumpy gray teapot and brilliantly glazed cups, her three paintings by three different artists. The one by her father showed a girl in a room with scarred walls and a black stove, shaking a lifesize doll with a human head about to topple off its shoulders. “Willie’s choice” she said when she saw Kate admiring it. “He gave it to me as a housewarming present.”

  “A hell of a present.”

  “That’s my father.”

  “No, I mean it. It’s so strong. I’m just wondering what it’s like to share a house with it.”

  “You’ll notice,” Melissa said, “that I don’t keep it in the bedroom.”

  Late that night, lying naked in a bed set into a wall of books (mostly textbooks, a fact that made Melissa blush), Melissa showed Kate photos of her childhood. Kate loved the seriousness on the child’s face as she composed herself with great consciousness for the camera. “I wish I could go back and visit you then,” she said.

  “I doubt that you would like me. I hardly even spoke very much.”

  Kate’s favorite photo, the one she threatened to sneak away when Melissa was sleeping, showed Melissa at ten, in a long white dress with more ruffles and lace trim than Kate could count. “Oh God,” she said when she first saw it. “Were you a bridesmaid?”

  Melissa shook her head. “Uh-uh. First communion.”

  “You’re kidding. Don’t tell me Willie is Catholic. Catholic upbringing maybe, but not practicing.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think it might appeal to him. Actually, it was Joanna’s idea. Stepmother number two. I suspect that she decided to save me when she couldn’t save my father.”

  Kate held the book up for a closer look. “Did you feel swept away in religious rapture?”

  “Hardly. I convinced myself it was a bridal dress and any minute a prince in a top hat and tails would lift me into his arms.”

  “I thought princes wore armor.”

  “Not my prince. Do you have any idea how much it hurts being hugged by someone in armor?”

  Kate kissed her, holding her with one hand and sliding the other down Melissa’s back to rub the roundness of her small soft ass. She said, “If you’ll settle for a commoner I’ll go rent the tux right now.”

  “Too late,” Melissa said. “When Joanna left I got so angry I made Billie—the gardener—tear up the dress and burn it.”

  Kate said, “I guess that means a naked wedding.”

  “Guess so.”

  At the back of the album Kate noticed a group of older photos, some in black and white, of people posing in the more formal style of earlier decades, when people considered photographs similar to painted portraits. “What are these?” she asked Melissa.

  “Just some old pictures I found in my father’s office. I think some are from my mother’s family, but I’ve never been able to persuade him to identify them for me. Oh, here’s one I know.” She pointed to a photo of a man with slicked-back hair standing next to a woman in a beaded dress. “These two are the family’s claim to fame before Willie.”

  Sickness twisted Kate’s insides. “Who are they?” she managed to say.

  “I never actually knew them because they died when I was a baby, but they were Willie’s aunt and uncle. Abel and Marguerite. They were performers. Dancers. They even appeared in a couple of movies.”

  Kate knew she had to get by herself. Speaking and moving as naturally as she could, she told Melissa she needed to go to the bathroom. Inside, with the door safely closed, she bent over, holding her belly while she willed the nausea to subside. Abel and Marguerite. Maybe Melissa had never known them, but Kate had. She’d even seen them perform. Mother Night had taken her to a party and she was fooling with Jimmy when suddenly someone started playing the piano and then a couple came out and did a dance with so many swirls and swoops that she and Jimmy had giggled helplessly in the corner. Shit, Kate thought. Goddamn it. It’s all wrong.

  The nausea came under control just as Melissa called, “Kate? Are you all right?” Going back to her lover, Kate thought how earlier that day Melissa had described Kate’s relationship with Laurie as “idyllic.” “It almost seems as if you never needed to rebel, she was always so supportive.” Now Kate thought how much her godmother had pushed Laurie to the background, and how difficult it was to rebel against Mother Night. In her mind she told Melissa, Ah honey, you think Willie Reed is tough?

  Their time ended on a bright Wednesday, good flying weather as Melissa said. All Tuesday Kate had insisted she still could cancel her television taping, the same one she’d canceled earlier to extend her stay in Melissa’s father’s house. Melissa refused to listen. “I don’t want to be the death of your career,” she said.

  Kate laughed. “Death is my career. And to tell you the truth, I think I wouldn’t mind letting it die.”

  “Well, I would mind. I want you to go on doing for others what you did for my father. And I want to
see the awe in people’s faces when I tell them, My lover is Kate Cohen, the Mistress of Death.”

  On the plane, trying not to cry, Kate thought of the son and daughter of an acquaintance of hers. Kate had visited the family on a day when the boy, six years old, had suddenly acquired his own room with the departure for college of a big brother. His very own room, the boy told Kate. No longer would he have to share bunk beds with his four-year-old sister. And yet when the time came to sleep, he looked wistfully at his new kingdom but lay down on his old bunk, just so he could tie a red string from his sister’s ankle to his own, so that when morning came, if she happened to wake up before him, her movement would yank the string and let him know the moment had come to resume playing. That’s us, Kate thought. She and Melissa, with an infinite string tied around their feet.

  That night, in the hotel room provided by the television station, Kate took a long time getting to sleep. As soon as she hung up the phone from speaking with Melissa, she just wanted to call her again. But Melissa had to grade papers that night, and Kate didn’t want her going to sleep too late. She didn’t want Melissa to suffer because of her.

  Without the weight and the sounds of Melissa’s body to enrapture her, Kate dreamt for the first time in days. She and Melissa were walking along the river, watching a rowing team perfect their silent glide. The coxswain seemed to be shouting the stroke, but Kate could hear nothing. She looked up to discover birds performing some complicated dance. How do they make all those arrangements, she wondered. What do they say to each other?

  One of the birds began to descend, a huge thing of no species Kate had ever seen, all ragged feathers and a sharp yellow beak, dropping feet first, with its wings unfurled and its talons arched, ready to strike. Melissa stared up at it, smiling, and Kate knew that if she didn’t warn Melissa to get out of the way the bird would slash open her face.

  She was still trying to get the words out when the dream shifted and she was lying on a tar and gravel roof. Though she was naked, her skin and even her muscles and organs had turned to a dark mud which clogged her mouth and ears. Near her, on a wooden rack, stood nine bottles of Phytolacca and vodka. The Good Stuff, as Melissa had taken to calling it. Only, eight of the bottles had broken so that the tincture had leaked away into the dirt, and the ninth just sat there, farther away than the birds. The birds, she thought. If she could just get them to come down and tear away the mud then she could get to the bottle. If she could just call them—if she could just—

  She woke up slowly, confused as to where she was and what she was doing. Sunlight filled the room. Nine o’clock, she saw, when she picked up her miniature alarm clock, a sunny nine A.M. in a hotel room much too far from Melissa’s body. Sadness filled her at the sight of the unused pillow beside her on the bed. She reached for the phone. Still sleepy, she needed two tries before she could dial all the numbers right. When the phone finally rang she knew even before the fourth ring that she would have to settle for the sound of Melissa’s voice on the tape. “Hello. This is the answering machine of Melissa Serenity Evans, the happiest woman on Earth. When you hear the beep, please leave your message about biochemistry, snake charming, or anything in between.”

  “Hello, my darling,” Kate said. “This is your reptile lady, in agony of missing you. I tried cuddling the python last night, but it just wasn’t the same.” She rambled on about the interview coming up, their plans to get together again, and whatever else she could think of until the beep of the machine cut her off. She called the college next, only to have the secretary in the chemistry department tell her that Dr. Evans hadn’t come in yet. Feeling about to cry, Kate put down the phone and padded into the bathroom to start getting ready for the taping.

  Throughout the interview Kate kept losing her concentration. Her ankle itched, and just as the interviewer would launch some hard-hitting question (“Have you ever done follow-up on the people you rescue from death?” or “Why have you refused to license this wonderful elixir of yours?”) Kate would bend over to scratch her leg or, worse, smile at the thought that it was Melissa, pulling on the red string. Luckily she’d heard the questions many times before and could plug in the suitable answers without having to think much. She even managed to hold up her twin bottles of cure-all with the right element of drama and flair.

  Kate had finished the interview and was leaving the station, half annoyed with her lack of professionalism and half thinking of retirement, when the assistant producer who’d herded her through makeup and lighting checks came up to her. “Ms. Cohen? There’s a message for you.” Kate grinned, thinking Melissa had felt the string tug and was calling to wish her well, or maybe apologize for distracting her. The producer handed Kate a card. “A Mr. Haverwell called for you. He asked if you could call him as soon as possible.”

  “Where?” Kate asked.

  “The number’s right there. I wrote it—”

  “No. Where the goddamn hell is a phone?” Startled by Kate’s rudeness even more than her alarm, the producer took her to a small office where he silently cued the phone for an outside line. Kate had punched in the number even before he left.

  Haverwell answered on the second ring, saying only “Yes?” Kate could hear the sound of an engine and she thought he must be in a car until she realized the sound was too large and was more likely a plane. Why would Jason Haverwell call her from a plane?

  She said, “Jason, this is Kate Cohen.”

  “Oh, Ms. Cohen. Thank God.”

  “What is it? Is it Will—Has Mr. Evans suffered a setback?”

  “No. No, Mr. Evans is fine. He’s right here with me. We’re calling—you’ve called us on a plane. I’m afraid—I’m afraid I have some bad news.” No, Kate thought, I don’t want to hear this. Jason said, “There’s been an accident. Ms. Evans—Melissa’s car apparently skidded off the road this morning. Apparently, it crashed into a bridge post.”

  Apparently, apparently, Kate thought. “Is she—how is she?”

  “In critical condition.” Kate’s breath exploded out of her. She wasn’t dead. They hadn’t come for her. No redheaded bikers disguised as paramedics were zipping up her body bag. Haverwell said, “The doctors won’t say what her chances are, just that she’s in grave danger.”

  “I have to get there.”

  “Of course. According to the police, Ms. Evans stayed conscious long enough to give them first your phone number and then Mr. Evans’s. Apparently she gave them your number over and over until she passed out.”

  If I’d been home, Kate thought, I would have heard right away. She said, “I need plane tickets.”

  “It’s already arranged. You have shuttle reservations for three o’clock, four o’clock, and five o’clock, whichever one you can reach. If you call us from the airport or the plane, we’ll make sure a driver is waiting for you when you land.”

  “Thank you. Give me the hospital number as well.” She wrote it down alongside Evans’s cellular number on the paper the producer had given her. “Thank you,” she said again. “I’m on my way.” Before she hung up she added, “Oh, and thank Mr. Evans for me. We’ll speak at the hospital.”

  “Of course. Thank you, Ms. Cohen. I…I’ve known Melissa all her life and—” Kate could hear him swallow tears. “I hope you get there in time,” he said.

  She called the hospital twice from the plane, with no news either time. For the rest of the flight she just sat there, unable to read or to eat or drink any of the food or liquids the stewardess kept putting in front of her. Toward the end she found herself looking around at the other passengers. A man was swaying in his seat as he read from a small leather-bound book. Another man had closed his eyes and was moving his lips as he fingered a set of beads. A woman was turning cards over on the tray in front of her, three rows of three, and then she would shuffle them and do it all again.

  They were all praying, Kate realized, for protection or help or just peace. That’s what she should do. If ever there was a time…But how? Kate could hardly thin
k about prayer, let alone work out how to do it. Talking to some invisible god had never made any sense to her when all she had to do was blow a whistle and Mother Night would come stand in front of her.

  She took the whistle out from under her blouse and rubbed it between her fingers. What would she say? Beg her to spare Melissa? What if she refused, the way she’d refused to help Alicia Curran so many years ago? Maybe, Kate thought, she could just get Mother Night talking and refuse to let her go. Any time Godmother tried to go, Kate could just blow the whistle and summon her again. But suppose Mother Night took back the whistle? Anyway, as long as the MGs remained outside Kate’s control, holding Mother Night wouldn’t make any difference at all. She would see her godmother soon enough, Kate thought. At the head or the foot of Melissa’s hospital bed.

  In the car from the airport Kate thought of her plan never to die. All she had to do was ask her godmother, she’d believed, and her godmother would save her from everything. Now all she cared about was this one case. Melissa. Just save Melissa.

  Though Willie hadn’t arrived yet, he’d given word to the hospital to send Kate up immediately. “Usually we only allow immediate family—” the woman at the desk tried to tell her, but Kate didn’t wait to hear it. In the elevator it struck her that intensive care units often put people in open beds so that the specialized nursing staff could watch over everyone at once and call for help as soon as someone hit a crisis. She didn’t like that. She wanted to do whatever she needed to do behind closed doors. When she reached the floor, however, she discovered that the hospital maintained a VIP intensive care room, specially set up with a private nurse for anyone willing to pay for it. The power of money, Kate thought. The power of art.