Not one of their children understood the native tongue, though all were well versed in the Latin responses at mass and Old Country superstitions. When it came to breeding viable heirs, they also showed a dismal record.
Their only daughter, Chloe, proved to be barren. I was the only offspring of the older son, Giovanni. My first cousin Faith, forty years younger than I, is the only surviving child of the younger, Tomas. Pious Tomas Zanelli, who had once planned to enter the priesthood, refused to allow the doctor to take his son's life to spare the mother, leaving it to “God's will;” mother and infant died. So there were only us two granddaughters to carry on the Zanelli siren heritage. Fortunately, both Faith and I were born sirens, though she has adamantly refused to acknowledge her heritage. To this day, cousin Faith is devoted to aligning her will to her Catholic God's, and her daughter's godless behavior in carrying on an adulterous affair has put Faith's head into a tailspin.
My head, on the other hand, was always full of fancies about international travel, bright city lights, and the future. In my dresser were pictures cut from pictorial magazines of future Americans walking around with balloons attached to their sleeves that would lift them into the sky. In 1911, when an airship crossed the English Channel for the first time, I stayed out all night with friends to celebrate. But, I digress.
My father was twenty years older than Tomas and a wanderer. Gio Zanelli set out as a teenager to conquer the American West with his voice, but his sole conquest was my mother, his former Saratoga neighbor and shy childhood sweetheart, Kate Vye. Gio Zanelli and Kate Vye wed one blustery afternoon before a traveling Justice of the Peace in Belle Fourche, Wyoming. The ceremony was followed in scandalously short order by my appearance; I had been in the womb for ten months, a siren's normal term.
Here is how my mother happened to be in the mountainous wilds of Wyoming instead of cozily blossoming into womanhood in the middle classes of Saratoga society, where Kate, a timid soul, would have much preferred to be.
After the Civil War, enticing pamphlets were circulating in the East about homesteading in the Wyoming Territory. One landed in the hands of my maternal grandmother, Mary Vye, a plain woman with a wild imagination. In her fiction-filled mind, as my grandfather would tell me decades later, the windy plains of Wyoming were the next best thing to the desolate moors of England where her favorite novels took place. She yearned to experience first-hand that kind of romantic setting, and her bachelor cousin was the owner of a goat ranch in Belle Fourche.
Mary's long-suffering husband, Captain Marcus Vye, was a sea captain in the Merchant Marine out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. While he was away at sea one summer, Mary bundled up her romance novels and their young daughter Kate, and set out on the train for Wyoming. A year passed, and Mary Vye did not return East. A decade later, after my parents married, she moved to a cabin in Bulette, Wyoming. There she died in her sleep one night, the snow piled up past the window and a romance novel resting on her bosom.
When I was twelve, my mother and I journeyed on the train to visit our New York relatives. My father's sister, Chloe Raleigh, was a blithe spirit who doted on me. I had such a good time that I prevailed on mother to let me stay on for the summer. A month after Kate returned to Wyoming, her recurring illness was diagnosed as tuberculosis. My stay in Saratoga was further extended. Three years later, in the fall of 1895, Gio told Kate that Buffalo Bill Cody was holding auditions at the Sheridan Inn for his Wild West Show. The next day, my father packed his suitcase and vanished for good. So, with my mother close to death and my father gone, Aunt Chloe said I was welcome to remain indefinitely in Saratoga Springs, and I was fairly content to do so.
The teenage years are a pivotal time in a siren's development. For six years I thrived in a gay environment of racing events, theatrical people, and handsome military men with whom I loved to dance and flirt. I attended the private girls' school where my uncle, Charles Raleigh, was bandmaster. I excelled far above the human girls in my studies and finished them at fifteen, without once resorting to siren tricks. I also acted in and wrote stage plays for a regional theater.
Annually I received a letter from my grandfather. Captain Vye had taken the long train ride west to visit the gravesites of his wife and daughter. There he fell in love with Wyoming's wide open spaces. The remoteness of the northeast corner reminded him of his life at sea. For his retirement he bought a former millhouse on a creek-side elevation near the tiny village of Alta. “My stone home,” he wrote me, “is like a sailing ship, upright amid blustering elements. One day I hope you will visit me at Mill's Creek.”
Eventually I proved myself to be my father's daughter. I became restless. As a blossoming siren, I was also preternaturally alive to the intricate sexual games men and women play. Aunt Chloe educated me, in fits and starts, about my siren nature. However, she never discussed sex. I was full of unspent sexual energy, and as a fifteen-year-old siren consumed with curiosity, I felt I had waited long enough. I decided I would lose my virginity to a music teacher, forty-year-old Aldo LaRosa.
Aldo was jittery, with big, watery eyes and a thin, twitchy mustache. The Italian maestro had a regional reputation as a ladies' man. Soon after arriving at Aunt Chloe's, I had picked up her old zither and played it expertly; I needed no lessons. But as Aldo seemed ideal for what I had in mind, I pretended to be an eager amateur. Uncle Charles arranged private zither lessons with LaRosa at a special rate through the girls' school.
After a few lessons at the maestro's home (and on a day when his wife Giselle was on a monthly visit to her mother in Albany), I passed my final examination by demonstrating I could simultaneously play the zither, recite an opera script from memory, and bring my teacher quickly to climax. Our affair carried on undetected for three years. However, I never experienced the exquisite pleasure of a human orgasm, nor reached the deep well of tender emotions humans are capable of feeling. I longed to do so.
One day, when I was standing and playing with nothing on except a cinch corset around my waist, Giselle appeared in the music room. She had arrived home from Albany and stepped in without knocking. Aldo's big false teeth were bared directly over the crack between my exposed buttocks. On his face was an idiotic smile. “You're home two days early, my dear,” Aldo observed. Giselle screamed and then promptly fainted.
Not only my sense of danger but also my curiosity was keenly aroused. The ensuing uproar would surely endanger the security and esteem I had come to enjoy in my aunt's happy home, the first I had ever known. I was determined not to be the cause of shame for them. But what an opportunity to put my powers to the test! I decided I would repair the situation by making Giselle disbelieve what she had seen with her very own eyes.
Terrified, but also eager to see if willpower and cleverness could save the day, I returned the next morning to the LaRosa household, which was in total disarray, the maestro having been banished. I sought out the wronged wife in her sewing room.
At the sight of me, in a dress with a high-collared shirtwaist and a bonnet plain enough for any Quaker maid (which I certainly was not), Giselle broke out into a torrent of angry tears and showered me with verbal abuse.
“Get out, you vixen from hell, before I kill you!”
But I had practiced my act well. I knelt before Giselle with clasped hands aloft and in soothing tones begged her to listen to what I had to say, and then I would go. I swore my intent was to right a terrible wrong. Finally, she stopped screaming.
Drilling Giselle straight through the eyes, I swore on my mother's grave that Aldo was not the man she took him to be. “Giselle, he is innocent, and he loves only you.”
When I saw I had her full attention, I launched into my story.
“While I was practicing Mozart, a wasp flew through the open window and stung me through my thin summer skirt, directly on the buttocks. I cried out in terror, for I am fatally allergic to insect stings. With his eyes firmly shut, Maestro LaRosa calmly suggested I take off my pantaloons and locate the wound, then poin
t at it with one finger. I did as he ordered. Not until then did he open his eyes.
“'Right here?' he asked. I could only nod, as I was close to death from the poisons racing through my bloodstream.
“Then Maestro showed the great bravery he is capable of by putting his mouth directly upon the wound and seizing the toxic stinger between his teeth. He yanked, and it came directly out. That is when you came in, Mrs. LaRosa. And what you saw was your husband saving a pupil's life. Alas, it was at the expense of his own happiness.”
Giselle could not take her eyes away while I talked, willing her to believe my explanation. She gave a resigned shrug. The injured wife had bought my story, hook, line, and stinger! I congratulated myself on the strength of my powers. But I have since come to see that my strategy would have worked even without tricks, because a coxcomb's wife will believe anything that allows her to go on with her sordid life unaltered.
I was fairly pleased with this successful trial of my abilities, until I noticed married women were steering their husbands away from me at social functions. I had saved my lover’s skin, but not my own reputation. I foresaw I was doomed to be a wallflower in rooms where I had previously been petted and admired. I was no match for small-town gossip. It was time to seek a new life, in a different part of the country.
On a warm October day in 1899, I left the protection of my kind aunt's home for the wilds of Wyoming. She chose that moment to entrust me with the siren's cloak.
Now, our baroque zither is my most cherished possession, but its power pales in comparison to the traveling cloak. Aunt Chloe held it out to me with a reverence suitable for the transference of ancient crown jewels.
I saw only an old, dusty coat, and I gazed at it skeptically.
“When my mother gave me this cloak, she said its great powers would protect me from any harm. I could outface my enemies, defeat evil spirits, and even postpone death by wearing it and willing myself to be undetected.”
I asked her how that could possibly be. Aunt Chloe said the cloak has the ability to inch a siren backward or forward through time, creating a temporary invisibility. All I had to do was flash five fingers, then curl them into a fist, then flash them again: 5—0—5.
I am sorry to say I laughed aloud, believing I was being told an old wives' tale. Besides, I would have no enemies once I left Saratoga.
“Did you ever try it out, Aunt?” I asked.
“I did, once.”
“And?”
“The cloak made me itch, so I took it off.”
I suppressed a smile. “What do you propose I should do with it?”
“Wear it on your journey, Cassandra. It will guard you. God forbid you ever need protection, but our lives tend to be challenging, as you have already discovered.”
We smiled at each other through our tears.
We both knew she did not have the same powers or the same troublesome desires I had. Aunt Chloe had graciously attributed the maestro incident to youthful exuberance, rather than any desire on my part to do harm to humans. Nonetheless, she was not entirely sorry to see me go.
At eighteen, my looks and my powers were coming into full bloom, and my nature would compel me to test them further. For a powerful siren, operating in a middle-class community where she is dependent on relatives' charity is not ideal. Idle gossip would soon become a virulent, persistent buzz. A visit to Grandfather Vye in Wyoming seemed a providential opportunity to start my adult life in a more conducive location. Alta was not far from my birthplace, and even more remote, high in the mountains. I desired to live freely. Hopefully in Wyoming I would find that extra latitude and the passionate life I envisioned for myself.
My aunt warned me to be careful about whom I passed the cloak along to. “One day the next rightful owner will come along,” she said. “You will recognize the proper moment, as I have. Wait until then. Evil forces lurk who wish us harm.”
To appease my aunt, who was worried about my traveling so far unprotected, I put on the cloak. Then and there, I decided I would leave behind, along with my besmirched reputation, my maiden name. If all I had been told was true, then the Zanelli surname might invite the attention of those invisible, unfriendly forces Aunt Chloe feared.
Henceforth, I would be known as Cassandra Vye.
After arriving at Captain Vye's stone home in Alta in the fall of 1899, I kept my distance from the townspeople. I soon made it a point, however, to visit the graves of my mother and grandmother at the Scottish Presbyterian churchyard in Bulette, only a few miles away. Telling grandfather I needed no chaperone, I rode alone. I took my zither, and while standing before the graves, I played a love song for Kate and Mary.
It happened that as my song drew to a close, Augustus “Curly” Drake, the Alta innkeeper, was driving by the churchyard in his gig, drawn by two black horses. He heard the music, stopped, got down, and immediately was at my side.
“Who are you? Can such beauty exist in this wilderness?”
We stared at each other wordlessly. The current flowing between us was mutually irresistible. I had never before felt such an electric attraction. We made love the next day, and the day after that, I experienced my first human orgasm. I was instantly hooked.
In the case of a siren, love occurs only at first sight. Destiny had ordained I would meet and fall in love with Curly Drake when I was still a reckless young woman, thus setting off a chain of human events leading to the crisis our family now faces, the threat of extinction.
Aunt Chloe had told me that both extinction and evil forces threaten our kind. She herself was not gifted, but she said skipping a generation is not the worst fate that may befall our powers. “Sometimes a siren, male or female, will use them for evil rather than good, as did the mythical sirens portrayed in Greek literature. The result is catastrophic, both for ourselves and the reputation of our lineage.”
There was a day, four decades after the curse originated, when I came close to passing our magic cloak along but stopped short of doing so, because I feared its powers might be used for ill-gotten gain. It was April 20, 1947, shortly after I retired from acting on the stage, when my son appeared at my residence on Nob Hill in San Francisco.
Indeed I was inclined to give Caesar the cloak. But my instincts rebelled against the idea, and I did not make the transfer. In ‘70s parlance, my “love child” was an immediate “turn-off.” I could see my firstborn was a wanderer like my father and, even worse, an alcoholic bum with no sense of responsibility toward either humans or our kind. I warned Caesar about our curse, but sadly, that was the extent of my home schooling of him. I do regret it now, as I foresee trouble ahead in the person of my untutored grandson, Dakota.
I might add it takes a powerful siren to bring forth a male of our species upon this earth. Gifted male progeny of a siren are even rarer. In the males, the paranormal power presents as a demonic tendency at worst or a gentle genius at best. The labels do not do justice to the complexity of the character involved. Most commonly, the male will appear as a twin brother to a red-haired female and will have few, if any, special powers.
I have never regretted denying Caesar our powerful cloak. That day, after he left, I checked to make sure that the cloak was safe in its hiding place, that an evil force pursuing him had not managed to spirit it away. I myself no longer used the invisibility cloak, and my daughter Chloe had refused to take it off my hands. My life, by that time, was exactly as I wanted it. I didn't desire to mesmerize or lure men into actions they would otherwise not take, or to pursue a sexual instinct that might lead to a man's untimely death. Indeed, by the time Caesar showed up, I was living an exemplary life that not even Widow Brown could have found fault with. I was using my powers solely for altruistic purposes. The most basic and harmless of a siren's powers, our eidetic memory, was the one I used most often. Perfect recall makes learning lines a swift operation. I can learn in a glance what it takes others days or weeks to memorize.
Chloe has this same ability. She is a brilliant woman
; I say so with total objectivity. My daughter is an erudite pioneer in Jungian scholarship and has published ten books that are translated into five languages. She travels and speaks world-wide on the arcane subjects of the collective unconscious and evolutionary psychology.
Among the Zanelli sirens, however, I alone possess the rarest gift: second sight, as my name implies. Which is not to say I understand the pictures of the future that I see. LOL.
Now, where did those cryptic letters come from? I have seen them in my dreams.
LOL is code of some sort.
Aha, a picture is forming; the date is December 21, 2012, thirty-six years from today. The Mayans have predicted the world will end on that date. But I know better. On that day, I see a red-haired young woman recording the three letters on a magical tablet. She will write them with a twiddle of her thumbs, if you can believe it.
I was speaking at the outset of unintended consequences. Sirens are strong women with extraordinary skills. Many humans have paranormal gifts, if they only knew how to tap into them. There are often unintended consequences in the lives of strong women, human or siren, as they forge ahead rather than take the traditional passive role. Therefore, they make mistakes. Should they automatically be demonized and persecuted? I think not!
Our siren brains are much like the tablet on which the siren of the future writes code. We receive more than we understand. For instance, the young woman's tablet appears to me to have magical powers. But in my dream, when I point that out to her, she laughs and says, “Oh, you're so funny, Cassandra. That's only my iPad.”
The Siren's Tale Page 2