Exit Unicorns

by Cindy Brandner

  ‘That story you told me about Nova Scotia and ancient parents, it’s just a story isn’t it?’

  Geography was simple; you could name a place, stick a pin in a map and say ‘this is where I’m from.’ But it was just a lie as well, it didn’t take into account the various environments, the thousands that could exist in a single square mile. It didn’t explain the curve of light in the morning, the sound of birds, the walls of your home, the voices that you heard as you fell asleep and the ones you did not.

  So begin at the beginning. The beginning is always a woman, whether she is known or not, a woman who has held the structure of your bones and flesh within the cage of her own for nine months and for that fact alone she is mother. Not mama, or mommy or the endearments that will come naturally to a child’s lips but mother for reasons of pure genetics.

  Her own mother was a bit of a fairytale, told by her father, glossed over with his forgiving tongue and rose-colored memory.

  Arielle Vincente was a certified Southern belle, from the wounded heart of the Deep South. Bourbon with a mixer of swamp water ran in her veins rather than blood. Black-haired, violet-eyed with the skin of a hothouse flower, she was occasionally mistaken for Elizabeth Taylor by strangers in the street. No money but breeding aplenty which in the South was more important, even in the bleak years following World War Two.

  Arielle Vincente walked as though she were doing so horizontally rather than vertically. In fact, as her Aunt Dick had been wont to say, Arielle managed to imbue each and every movement as though she were committing it ‘buck-nekkid on a mink rug’.

  Arielle had been spoiled, that was certainly no secret, and in a family as eccentric as the Vincentes, so little a sin was hardly worth a mention. Why, when on her third birthday she’d been given a strand of pearls and had promptly bit them to see if they were real, the family had only laughed. Avariciousness after all was not uncommon amongst the Vincentes.

  Arielle had been forgiven everything in advance of her sojourn on earth because, quite simply, she was terribly, exquisitely, frighteningly beautiful. Personality, said Aunt Dick, wasn’t crucial when you looked the way Arielle did.

  She could smell money, all the Vincentes could, but Arielle had a nose like a bloodhound on her. Thomas, Pamela’s father, said she must have scented him on the wind like a ripe piece of fruit, fuzzy, sweet and just dying to be plucked. Thomas, a hardheaded tough Irishman who’d fought his way from an immigrant ship with two dollars in his pocket to being counted among the top five hundred wealthiest people in America, was little more than putty in her hands.

  ‘She had the Fall of Man stamped all over her...I’d never seen anybody who looked like she did.’ Her father, two glasses into the whiskey bottle would tell her the same story and show her the same pictures of a woman who was no more familiar than a movie star was. ‘But some women just aren’t made to be mothers,’ he’d say to the bottom of his glass.

  It was a hard lesson to learn. That the simple biological ability to procreate did not necessitate a maternal heart. That whispering the word ‘mama’ like a prayer into the night didn’t get you an answer, the word just faded into the blackness like all the others. She’d come to accept it on an intellectual level as time went on. That contrary to what men thought and the Bible said, women weren’t born to have babies and love men, maybe some were but a whole hell of a lot weren’t. Which accounted for the anger and sadness that seemed to hang about most women like a gray, sour miasma. Still she’d been sad, known anger and despair towards the woman who’d given birth to her. Not that there weren’t several women who tried out as replacement. They could smell money too, though, and even when she was small, she knew this wasn’t a promising quality in a potential mother. Her dad was attractive in his own right and she figured they were just as thrilled about his thick, black hair, hazel eyes and raw Irish good looks as they were about his money. She just didn’t quite see how she fit into the picture.

  Once, not long before he’d died, her father had said to her that a man ought to know better than to try to capture something so beautiful as her mother had been, because that kind of beauty is always going to break someone’s heart. She started picturing her mother as a moth after that, one of the pale, pale green ones that looked like a leaf until you got up real close and saw it quiver. When you were foolish enough to put one in the cup of your hands, just because you wanted to feel that beauty for a second, it would flap and flap, getting more and more frantic until your hands were full of its wing powder that her father had said were actually tiny hairs and then the moth couldn’t fly anymore. And if a moth couldn’t fly, it might as well be dead.

  Maybe she’d inherited that need to capture that which shouldn’t be touched from her father along with her height and squared off nails. Because it was how she was starting to feel about Jamie, that if she were to reach out and touch she would destroy whatever fragile balance it was he maintained for himself. It wasn’t warmth she felt there only a brilliant shattering pain that glittered for the world and cut him to shreds inside. When she reached out her hands, she wanted heat, not something that dried the breath in her lungs and cut a valley through her chest. When Casey had looked at her that morning in the trailer she’d felt fire, but when he’d touched her the night before—just the rough side of a thumb on her chin—she’d felt warmth and had liked the feel a lot.

  Chapter Ten

  Under My Skin

  There were times when all the troubles in the world paled in comparison to finding the right dress. It was just this Pamela said to Maggie, having hunted in futility and now wilting hope that she would find anything to wear to the wedding of Casey’s friend. Maggie had nodded, taking a break from washing crystal and lighting a cigarette, ran an assessing eye over Pamela and muttered something to herself.

  “Ye must like this boy a great deal,” she said, a wicked light twinkling in her brown eyes.

  “Not so very much,” Pamela said hotly and unconvincingly.

  “Well not to worry, I think I might have just what yer lookin’ fer.”

  Doubting this very much, Pamela was pleasantly surprised when, after the remnants of lunch were cleared away, Maggie had dragged her off upstairs to one of the guestrooms and leaving her standing in the middle of the echoing room came back with a dress that was beyond any expectations. Even those of a girl wanting very much to look like a woman.

  “Tisn’t a color any woman could wear, but I thought those eyes of yers could stand up to it.”

  It was somewhere between green and silver, silk, a color that shifted and slid and beckoned and called without making a sound. The waist was nipped in, the skirt full, falling to mid-calf. Held up by two velvet straps, it exposed a shocking amount of skin. If not by the decade’s standards then by the standards of the Roman Catholic Church she’d look like a woman, who if not already fallen, was certainly looking to take a headlong tumble. It was, without question, perfect.

  “Wherever did you get it?” she asked the admiring Maggie, as she cast a flirty look over one bare shoulder into the mirror.

  “Was her ladyship’s, she’d clothes like nothin’ I’d ever seen before an’ when she was done with ‘em she’d let us have our pick an’ the rest were to go to charity. She was so slim though, ‘twas a rare woman who could squeeze into her leavins’. This dress though I couldn’t bear to part with. I thought of it as soon as ye said—what are ye doin’?”

  “Taking it off,” Pamela said firmly, “I’ll not wear someone else’s clothes.”

  Maggie raised her eyebrows in a way that told Pamela she knew it wasn’t the secondhandedness of the dress but rather who had worn it first.

  “It’s not as if the woman’s dead or anythin’,” Maggie said practically, “an’ Lord knows where she is now she’s no need of fancy frocks.”

  Two days later, after a relentless hunt through shops she couldn’t afford and ones she didn’t want to, she w
as forced to admit there wasn’t a dress in Belfast that could hold a candle to that simple, elegant dress that had once belonged to Jamie Kirkpatrick’s wife.

  Which was how, after some sly coercing on Maggie’s part, she found herself standing in the kitchen with Casey staring speechlessly at her.

  “Well,” she said in desperation after two minutes under the assault of his relentless gaze.

  “Ye look like an angel,” he said simply and offered her his arm.

  It was a lovely day for a wedding, the sun bright, the blue sky glorious, the smell of orange blossom ambrosial, the bridesmaids radiant butterflies in their pale yellow dresses. The boys uncomfortably handsome in their suits. Pamela had never been to a wedding before and found she quite like the unabashed sentimentalism and celebration of love.

  Arriving on Casey’s arm she attracted quite a bit of attention. Most of the stares were friendly, curious, half-shy wondering who this girl with Casey was, a man they’d grown up with and were seeing for the first time in five years. There was one discordant note amongst the lilting glances though and it came in the form of a girl, who, though a bit hard around the eyes was undoubtedly beautiful. The kind of girl who ought to have left Ireland at the first shot and gone to bloom in more worldly climes. This one hadn’t left and it showed in the narrowness of eye and clench of mouth. Her eyes made no secret of their interest in Casey and the glare she periodically bestowed on Pamela felt like a scarlet brand on her forehead. Casey, on the other hand, seemed blithely unaware of the focused attention and though friendly to all, didn’t spare too many glances for anyone but Pamela.

  When finally after the ceremony was complete, the pictures of the happy couple taken, the light dinner eaten and the first ramshackle notes of the band sounded—‘cousins of the bride ye understand’ Casey informed her—she worked up sufficient courage to inquire as to the identity of the hard-eyed miss, Casey replied with a laconic, ‘dated her if ye could call it that before I went away.’ A satisfactory answer it wasn’t but it quieted her curiosity for the moment and in the enjoyment of the evening, she almost forgot the girl and her disturbing glare. She was danced off her feet by every male, young and old, eligible and otherwise but found herself in Casey’s arms every time the music slowed to a beat designed for intimacy. She almost wished there was a nun about with a ruler who would push them apart for decency’s sake. Casey, as was to be expected, considering the nature of the day and that it was his first social occasion since returning home was plied with drinks and was sweetly drunk by the midpoint of the evening.

  The band, near to the end of their second set, in a rather startling display of talent, launched into a silky, peach-hot rendition of ‘La Vie en Rose’.

  Hold me close and hold me fast,

  Casey sang in her ear, voice in melting honey contrast to the trumpet’s throaty chuckle and the piano’s sliding glissandos. His hands traveled the smooth, bare skin of her back and tangled in her hair.

  Give your heart and soul to me

  And life will always be,

  La vie en rose.

  He was little more than whispering now, his lips on her ear and she was just about to tilt her head back and offer her mouth in replacement when a voice rang out.

  “Did ye lose yer voice over there in England, or will ye sing for us tonight, Casey Riordan?”

  Casey, raising his face from its blissful perusal, shook his head ruefully. But then the bride called out, “Come on Casey man, ye can’t refuse the bride, sing for us, just one.”

  Casey disengaged from their embrace and Pamela could feel the regret of his skin as it lost contact with her own. A whiskey, pressed on him by hands that pushed him towards the band, made him less reticent about the whole thing and after looking behind and saying something to the band, he sang an old Irish favorite. His voice was a surprise. It had a purity on the higher notes, a clarity like bells that only true Celtic voices ever possessed and a whiskied huskiness on the lower ones that made more than one girl in the crowded hall wear a loose, dreamy look. The next song, demanded by the increasingly rowdy crowd, was meant expressly for her and Casey looking with direct intent left no doubt of that in anyone’s mind. Someone had lit and handed him a cigarette so that his eyes met hers through the sifting blue smoke that hung on the close air. He was perfectly still through the lazy, swinging first notes and then with a loose-jointed click of his fingers he slid very comfortably into the opening words of a tried and true Sinatra favorite.

  I’ve got you under my skin,

  He sang, with just the right amount of gin in the honey of his throat. Several interested heads turned to stare openly at her. She found however that as much as she might have liked to she could not break the gaze Casey’s eyes held her locked tight in.

  I’ve got you deep in the heart of me,

  So deep you’re a part of me,

  He crooned on, taking a drag on his cigarette in a lovely parody of Old Blue Eyes. She barely heard the words after that, aware only of his eyes and their heat, the way his tone and look left absolutely no doubt as to his intentions or feelings.

  But why should I try to resist, when I know so well...

  The words wove their spell and she would remember it forever, the first time she knew herself to be a desired woman, desired beyond sense and reason, desired beyond breath and need.

  I would sacrifice anything, come what may

  For the sake of holding you near...

  It was only later that she would understand just how deliberately he had chosen the song and she would cry for all the things youth only senses but does not, blindly, understand. He was hers for that moment and that moment only, but it was a magic that would taste sweet even when she was too old to remember the touch of a young man’s hands. By the next song, he belonged to the entire room again and the moment had slipped irretrievably into the white room of memory.

  He sang a few more ballads, sentimental favorites—‘One For My Baby’, ‘I’ll Be Seeing You,’ hazy, three am, my-baby-left-me-cryin’-in-my-booze songs. His voice handled it well, ambling, throaty, sexy songs. But then the tempo changed and the mood in the room shifted, tensed and heightened with some expectation she couldn’t understand and the music, as was inevitable she would later see, entered the hinterland of Republican paean. Music of the defeated, the rising up, the spiritual sturm und drang of a nation too long and well acquainted with the taste of losing. Songs of bards, poets, writers, lemmings and warriors, which all somehow in Ireland managed to amount to one profession.

  “Sing The Bold Fenian Men, a female voice said, from somewhere far to the right of the hall. Casey, taking a drink, looked in the direction of the shadows on that side of the room, his face suddenly wary and sober.

  “Ach no, my throat is near wore through, I need a stiffer drink than this,” he said holding a glass of water aloft.

  “Sing it, Casey. Get the man a drink so’s he can sing,” a different voice, less strident, more drunk.

  “Aye, sing it man,” more voices joining the chorus, voices lacking in lightness, the mood in the room cooling so rapidly that Pamela could feel a distinct chill creep up her backbone.

  “What’s the matter man? Have ye forgotten the songs yer daddy sang ye to sleep with or can ye only remember the words te God Save the Queen, now?”

  Pamela turned towards the voice but she didn’t need to see the speaker to know it was the hard-eyed girl, trying to provoke something ugly that had been simmering just under the surface of the crowd.

  She saw Casey hesitate, knew that for some reason he would rather walk wordless out of the hall than sing the song, but that it would be tantamount to suicide for him to do so. Particularly now that the friendly inebriation had turned to hostile drunkenness.

  He closed his eyes for a moment and then started in low and clear on the old and dear anthem of rebellion.

  As down by the glenside, I met an old wom
an,

  A plucking young nettles, she ne’er saw me coming,

  I listened awhile to the song she was humming,

  His voice rose, strong and fine, a cool wind blowing away confusion, his eyes still closed to the room.

  Glory, O Glory, O, to the bold Fenian Men.

  As I passed on my way, God be praised that I met her,

  Be life long or short, sure I’ll never forget her,

  We may have great men, but we’ll never have greater,

  Glory, O Glory, O, to the Bold Fenian Men!

  The voice of the crowd surged in roaring on the last line, but still Casey did not open his eyes, his words swept on over their heads, a single note of purity, a thousand years of blood and pride and insurrection there in one man’s song.

  Some died in the glenside, some died midst the stranger,

  And wise men have said that their cause was a failure,

  Beads of sweat broke out on his forehead and the chords in his neck stood out like thickly woven wire.

  But they loved dear old Ireland, and never feared danger.

  His eyes snapped open as if he’d been jolted from reverie and he stared above the crowd at some point that was beyond the room and the walls and even the breezes and the night sky and the stars that shone outside. He stared back over dead loved ones, to ghosts that would not rest and blood that would not wash away no matter how strong the water and he paused for a moment, several seconds that stretched across the silence and brought everyone under his power and then he spoke the words softly—

  Glory, O Glory, O, to the Bold Fenian Men!

  The crowd roared their approval and she saw that he’d been put to a test and had passed it though some uneasy currents drifted and eddied about the edges of the room. She saw him exchange looks with someone far behind her and nod almost imperceptibly. A moment later Pat stood at her elbow.

  “Casey wants me to take ye home,” he said simply to her questioning gaze.