There was a lot that the young girl didn’t not know about cleaning houses, especially rich houses, with lots of vitrines, and chandeliers, and gilded furniture, but she was a fast learner. She proved to be a hard worker, dexterous in the use of a duster and a broom. Soon enough, Mrs. Green recommended her services to her friends, and they did so to others. In a few months, she had a few regular employers that paid a fair wage and did so punctually.
Don’t think that because you work hard you’re earning your way to paradise, Rosa wrote her after receiving news of her newly acquired profession along with a crisp five dollar bill. You need to repent and do penance. Maybe one day, if you’re good, God will forgive you. Like he will forgive us.
Maybe one day, our little friend thought, folding the letter. And maybe one day her godfather would return too.
Maybe one day she would become rich. Maybe one day she would wake up with a smaller nose, with a less pointy chin, and with thinner eyebrows. Maybe one day she would get rid of the pimples. Maybe, if she wished for it hard enough, if she waited patiently, she would become beautiful. As beautiful as Mrs. Green. As beautiful as either of her two sisters. And then a man like Athanase Green would lift her up from the floor, squeeze the air out of her lungs, and kiss her.
Now, not all had been flowers and candy for Rosa and Victoria in the city. The day after their arrival, a day the girls expected to spend eating cake and playing board games, Magnolia revealed to them her plans of getting them enrolled in school so they could learn all sorts of important subjects, “like geography,” the woman explained with a big smile, “that will help you become better persons and better Christians.”
Magnolia’s intentions were to help them finish grade school then get them enrolled into Normal School so they could become teachers. In the two sisters’ opinion, education could do nothing for them in their quest for marriage. “Who cares about this shit?” they complained with clenched teeth after the woman gave them a syllabus. “We don’t for one, that’s all!”
Fortunately, they said this in a low voice, for they soon learned that Magnolia had no patience for rude or rebellious people.
“Elbows, please. Off the table… Don’t scratch. A lady never scratches in public… Keep your hair up and in a bun… Stay out of the sun, you’ll get freckles… The meat is only for Harris.”
In that respect, she and her husband couldn’t be more different. School was boring, Harris agreed. Perhaps unnecessary.
“Second grade. That was it. Never liked it.”
But he kept from expressing his opinions in front of his wife for fear of starting a quarrel. Harris hadn’t had a steady job in ten years, the girls learned, and the couple relied heavily on Magnolia’s wages.
Magnolia worked as the deputy headmistress at the Immaculate Heart of Mary, an all-girls Catholic school. As her position demanded, she was a rather strict, restless disciplinarian, who kept in high regard the feminine virtues of diligence, submission, and obedience, virtues that, she waited no time in letting the two sisters know, albeit with an ear to ear grin and a mellifluous tone, hard to battle, the two lacked abysmally.
In addition to a series of rules at the table, Magnolia forbade the girls to leave the house unescorted, to enter her bedroom or the kitchen without permission—the icebox was especially off limits—and to ever put a foot inside the attic, the door to which remained, in any case, always locked. That left the bedroom that the two sisters shared and the living room as the only spaces in which Rosa and Victoria could roam freely. However, the only activities allowed inside the living room were “to pray, to study, or to work your embroidery.” Therefore, the girls preferred to remain inside their bedroom, where they could do as they pleased. More often than not, what they did was to keep their noses stuck to the window, wishing they were outside.
“We’ll never meet a man, locked up in here.”
“We’ll never marry!”
Outside abounded temptation. The bars and the theaters on Broadway were just a few blocks away. They could see the lights at night from their window. But temptation “leads to damnation,” Magnolia reminded them often, often enough to make them scared, sometimes after smacking their hands with a ruler.
And Rosa and Victoria knew well what Hell could be like:
“Not the carefree revelry of the Sabbath…”
“Not the dancing, the feasting, and the celebrating…”
“But sorrow…”
“Pain…”
“…and mortification.”
Their fear of damnation now was so deep and abiding that they became god-fearing Christians. They had seen the gates to the netherworld open up in their own front yard; they had seen it reflected in their mother’s eyes the night she died, and now the mere mention of the place struck them with terror.
At school, they were heedless, undisciplined and inattentive. They talked back to their teachers and got into fights with their classmates; however, they didn’t listen when Prince Beelzebub appeared in their dreams and encouraged them with a melodious voice to lock Magnolia in the attic with Harris. They were tempted, but they never dared to call the goat’s name against any of their schoolmates, and they chased away their old familiars—the swarm of flies and the toad, sent from the netherworld to lure them back to the dark side—with rosaries and novenas. They refused to feed them with their blood and, left to starve, the fiends eventually disappeared. Still, they knew that the Prince of Darkness wouldn’t let them go that easily. They had promised to love, cherish, and obey him for all eternity; they knew he wouldn’t let them go unpunished. They were damned, condemned to burn in Hell forever, unless God, in his infinite mercy, could forgive them. They had to pray every day, go to mass every Sunday, and carry a rosary with them constantly, to be protected.
An extraordinary transformation, you’ll think. The daughters of a murderous witch praying Hail Marys. But you’ll surely remember, dear reader, what it was like to be young and learn that everything we like and enjoy is a sin. You’ll sure remember the embarrassment, the guilt for doing as the body wants. If you’re a woman, the feeling is twice-fold. If you’re a woman, you’re sin itself. If you are a woman, you are less worthy of the pleasures of an afterlife in paradise, and the urge to please God by mortifying the flesh and relinquishing your own desires is thereby much stronger.
Harris’s unmentionable condition was a constant reminder of how perilous it could be to make a pact with the Prince of Darkness.
“He made a terrible mistake in his youth,” Magnolia explained to the girls on their first trip to the butcher. “A folly for which he should do penance, and for which the four of us have to pray to our Holy Mother, the Blessed Virgin, every night of the week, so she will intercede with her son for his forgiveness.”
“When I finally found the courage to confess to my beloved Magnolia about my condition,” Harris said to the girls, climbing the stairs up to the little room in the attic, “after an eight-year-long engagement, she took the news with resignation. That, and not a secret wife, as she had come to suspect, was the reason for my monthly absenteeism.”
“I believe in the power of prayer,” Magnolia had said back then, clinging to the chest of her fiancé. “I will pray every night for your recovery.”
“She cried,” Harris continued, “but she also laughed for all the times she thought I was cheating, when instead your mother and I were scavenging corpses.”
Magnolia had had only one condition before they got married: that Harris would stop eating human flesh.
“I agreed, but under two more: that we would keep a spare room in our home with bars at the door and the windows where I could be restrained during the nights of full moon, so that I wouldn’t be a threat to Magnolia, and that we’d never have children, so the curse would die with me. It was hard for her to say yes to this last request, but still she accepted.”
“It wasn’t what I dr
eamed,” Magnolia said later to the girls, during one of those moments of vulnerability in which one’s aching truths are shared with the least suspecting over a glass of sherry. “Why would I want to marry a man who once a month turned into a murderous beast? He killed my friend Christina. He killed George and Angus. But he was kind, and I was turning thirty. Had I said no, perhaps I would have not gotten another proposal. And I thought that maybe one day we could have a child if things changed. If a miracle were to happen.”
“I haven’t had the need to taste human flesh in almost ten years,” Harris preened.
“The more we pray to the Virgin,” Magnolia invited the girls to kneel behind her on the hard wooden floor, “the closer Harris is to achieving the Lord’s forgiveness.”
“But if God is all love and kindness,” Victoria asked her sister in a low voice, “why can’t He just fix him? And why do we have to talk to Him through his mother? Why does Magnolia have to pray so much and be so unhappy?”
God must be such a selfish, narcissistic bastard, she thought, if he needed so much begging and mortification to grant such a small favor.
“If He knows it all,” Victoria continued, making sure Magnolia couldn’t hear, “if He’s all-powerful and full of mercy, why cannot he cure Harris? Doesn’t He love his mother? Or is it the Virgin who does not want to help? Magnolia shouldn’t have to live in constant fear. The Devil allowed our mother to perform great acts of magic in exchange for just blood. You want so-and-so to fall sick? It will cost you a pint. You want that person murdered? Give me two pints and one tooth. And it worked.”
“Because He’s righteous,” Rosa responded, smacking her sister on the back of her head. “And praying an hour every day is easier, anyway, and much less painful than letting a fiend drink your blood for fifteen minutes. Once you lose a tooth, you lose it forever. They don’t grow back, stupid.”
“One tooth is worth Harris’s health,” insisted Victoria.
“Perhaps you’d need to give more than one.”
Harris must have done something really bad; something truly unforgivable and offensive; something that required as many prayers are there are grains of sand in the beach to be pardoned.
“Whatever Harris did to deserve his curse,” Rosa wasn’t sure but she had a strong suspicion it had something to do with masturbation, “cannot be half as bad as what we did to please the Little Master and his acolytes during the Sabbath.”
Victoria had to agree. If Harris’s sins hadn’t yet been forgiven, after all those years, would theirs ever be?
They could only pray. And pray they did, every night, the twenty Mysteries of the Rosary, right after dinner. And it killed them; it made them feel guilty and ungrateful; it made them terribly sad, especially on those nights when Harris didn’t pray with them, when if somebody called for him they had to lie and say that he was indisposed and had gone to bed early, when he was actually locked inside the room in the attic; because they could hear him howl; they could hear him curse and stomp on the floor above them; they could hear him call them all a pack of whores; they could hear him swear by all the legions of demons from Hell that he would come down and kill them—it made them feel spoiled, unappreciative, and undeserving, for neither one ever prayed for his absolution but only for their own, so that they, and not Harris, were the ones that would obtain God’s forgiveness.
“We should pray for him at least once, Rosa. Don’t you think?”
“Every night we pray for ourselves is a minute less in purgatory.”
Despite their mediocre marks, Magnolia managed to get the two sisters accepted into Normal School. They returned to Venice every few weeks for a weekend, and for a full two months during summer. The young girl had to work harder during these visits, but she tried to make the best of it. She had few distractions outside her work, and to see her sisters all dolled up, wearing brass jewelry and dressed in the latest fashions, to hear them talking about life in the city, about the traffic, about the movies, made her feel as if she too were living a fabulous life in the City of Angels. The two had eventually found ways to fool Magnolia, and, on Fridays, they sneaked out of the house through the fire exit to go dance the foxtrot at the Alexandria ballroom.
Besides the extra work, a downside to these visits was that our little friend had to suffer the lessons in English grammar and religion that, in her sisters’ opinion, she so urgently needed. Rosa and Victoria were harsher tutors than Magnolia. The pinching and the paddling came first; then the lecture. If the young girl made a mistake, say, to forget what Ecclesiastes 7:9 read, they sent her to bed without dinner, the same dinner she had spent an hour cooking. If she responded correctly—“Be not quick in your spirit to become angry, for anger lodges in the bosom of fools”—they accused her of cheating, and sent her to bed without eating, the same.
On Christmas Day, the young girl and the drunkard joined them at Harris and Magnolia’s apartment in Bunker Hill. Harris felt sorry for the widower and his unattractive daughter, but Magnolia didn’t. She had heard too many horror stories about the man and the vicious little brat from the sisters; thus, she always ended asking the two of them to move to a place where they wouldn’t obstruct the traffic. Rosa reckoned that the best place for their Old Pa was on a chair next to the window. For their youngest sister, it was out in the corridor. More than once, dinner began and ended without either one at the table. The drunkard would have fallen asleep in his chair, and no one remembered to call the young girl, and she was too shy to come in and sit on her own. It was only after the last guest had left and they needed her help to clean off the table that someone remembered to call her.
“Your sister—what’s her name? Where is she hiding?”
It only seemed fair that she repaid for the invitation by helping Magnolia do the dishes.
As for Christmas presents, our little friend never got any.
“You never get nothing because you’re naughty,” Rosa teased her.
“Because you don’t say your prayers,” Victoria added, shuffling a new deck of cards they had received as a present.
“When you die,” Rosa continued, taking the deck from Victoria and offering it to her little sister to cut, “you will go straight to Hell. The goat will come and get you. You will burn for all eternity inside a pit of boiling pitch.”
“The Devil will come and fart on your face and cover you in vomit.”
“And we’ll go straight to heaven,” Rosa continued, putting down one half of the deck and revealing one card at a time from the other half.
“Because we repented, like Mami.”
“Because we believe in Jesus.”
“And in the Holy Trinity.”
“And in the purity of Virgin Mary—ah, the Hierophant!”
“Next to the Five of Pentacles. It means you’ll end up alone.”
“And in poverty.”
Divination in the form of tarot-reading was the only flair the two girls still cultivated.
The rest of their magical skills had been lost from lack of practice. Some blame is to be placed on Magnolia, who ceaselessly fostered in them the practice of praying as well as the fear of men and of anything sexual, but saw no harm in visiting psychics and asking the cards what the Holy Spirit wouldn’t respond to her directly: whether her husband would ever be forgiven.
“The Tower. You’ll never get to achieve nothing of nothing. You didn’t have what it takes to be a witch and you don’t have what it takes to be a good Christian… The Fool—what a surprise.”
The drunkard died in 1918, one year after the sisters’ graduation. After his death Rosa and Victoria’s visits to Venice became more and more sporadic, and no one missed the young girl when she stopped attending Victoria’s godparents’ house for the holidays.
7
In which the sisters return to Venice
On Christmas Eve 1922, after having spent the day visiting a
friend in Sherman, the two mean sisters returned to Harris and Magnolia’s apartment carrying a platter of potatoes au gratin and half a lemon pie which they had received as a present. They found the door ajar. No one answered their knocks, so they pushed the door open. They heard a thud as the door caught against something. They looked down and found that the object the door had hit was the severed head of Magnolia staring at them with an expression of horror. They looked up. Towards the end of the living room they saw a human-like beast with a long gray mane squatted over Magnolia’s body, eating her intestines. The beast looked back at them and growled, like a dog growls to a stranger approaching his food, but it didn’t move away from the corpse. The two sisters closed the door softly and sat in the hallway. Through the window they could see a full moon peeking over the top of the buildings.
A couple hours later, they heard a painful scream inside. They opened the door again and saw Harris, old, naked, and covered in blood, standing next to his wife’s lifeless body.
“I killed her,” he said in a sorrowful crying jag.
Victoria remained standing by the door. Rosa walked to the kitchen and packed the food they had brought, trying her best not to look at either Harris or what was left of Magnolia’s body. She returned after a few minutes and found her sister still at the same place, staring at the floor.
“He left,” Victoria said.
They never saw Harris again.
With little reason to remain in the city, they decided to go back to the beach and reclaim their inheritance, the house in the Linnie Canal that, in their opinion, their youngest sister had enjoyed for “darn too long.”
And, sure, the little woman had enjoyed the house all those years alone, without her father: when Rosa and Victoria opened the door, tired from dragging their suitcases all the way from the streetcar stop on Venice Boulevard, they found their nameless little sister sitting comfortably on a chair in the middle of the living room, eating from a box of chocolates, browsing through the pages of a Sears catalog, and listening to a gramophone record, her feet resting on a footstool and a shabby mixed poodle—presumably a descendant of the little brown pup—sleeping on her lap.
Love, or the Witches of Windward Circle Page 10