by Steven Clark
Pierre, settling for a mild Chernay while I did a Beaujolais, spoke of the East.
“I was in Tibet last year,” his eyes twinkled. “It was my fourth trip, and after meditating with the monks, I hiked in the mountains.”
“Searching for God or the abominable snowman?”
He cautiously smiled at my flippancy. “Snow leopards. They’re becoming extinct, you know. I wanted to see one, to … become one with it. Like that book Mathieson wrote. The Snow Leopard.”
I nodded, having skimmed through the book in my hippie phase. “And you can’t wait to get back?”
Pierre shifted his gaze to the stained glass window above the main entrance. His eyes were distant. He seemed absorbed in its depiction of three women, muses seated in regal majesty in red, gold, and blue robes representing San Francisco, St. Louis, and New York, the three great rail centers. Our muse, St. Louis, serenely in the center, arbiter of east and west. He fingered his glass.
“You could end this, Lee.”
“By bowing out?”
“Terri and I could make it worth your while.”
I sipped. “How much is my while worth?”
The idea of wanting a price saddened and stirred him. “I didn’t think you were going to cave.”
I smiled. “Curiosity is not caving.”
He gave a long look at the stained glass. St. Louis stared back, serene and unflappable. Pierre blinked and turned to me.
“The estate was to be divided between me and Terri. I’m really not into affluency and all that, and certainly not the Desouche thing.”
“Which is?”
“All of this St. Louis society claptrap. I’m happier away from it. I’m certain Mother filled you with the Desouche glory. The family, the mansion … I know Saul’s been taken in by it.”
Pierre looked off to the grand arch. Four women were carved above it at intervals, their hands holding orange torches that glowed brighter in the dark. You could easily have used them, the arch, for a scene in Lord of the Rings. I liked the way his eyes followed the stained glass and arch, appreciating their beauty. Pierre rattled his glass.
“I never want to come back here. When all of this brewed—” He paused.
“You were where?” I was gentle, seeking to defuse. The piano tickled “Send in the Clowns.”
Pierre relaxed and reclined his slender body into the plush chair. “Those orange lights remind me of Gesshoji. That’s where I was. It’s a Buddhist temple on the West coast of Japan. A wonderfully serene place.” His eyes painted a happy canvas. “It’s centuries old, and there’s this deep fragrance of the temple grounds. When the sun comes through the pines, it’s like you’re tripping out.” He frowned. “I mean, it’s almost hallucinatory.”
I gathered he was uneasy at anything recalling Lucas’s drugs and suicide. Pierre continued.
“There’s these hydrangeas. A luscious light blue. Thirty thousand of them. You walk to the tombs of the old lords, and the serenity …”
“You could hear a pin drop.”
Pierre nodded and waved away the waitress, content with his glass of water. “There are the crows.”
At the bar, a tourist croaked out, singing along with Judy Collins about clowns and clouds. I smiled at the tipsy laughter from the bar and rested my chin on my hand. “Crows?”
“Enormous crows. Their feathers shine like waxed cars, and cry out if you get anywhere near them. They light on stone lanterns and caw.” He sighed. “It’s said they’re lost spirits. Japan’s full of them. At Gesshoji, I’m reminded of why I became a Buddhist. Of how illusory human life and individuality is.”
“Yet,” I said carefully, “you want the money.”
“I see, Lee. An accusation. The hypocrisy of a rich man seeking truth.”
“Not an accusation, just a comment. By the way, I love the way you describe the crows. If I ever go to Japan, I must see them. They should be the official bird of Hollywood; all noise and publicity.”
Pierre laughed.
I leaned closer. “I understand the first time you went to Gesshoji was when Lucas died.” Pierre closed up for a moment, then sipped his water. “Mother told you?”
“It was in the papers.”
“I went there to recover. I admit that. Gesshoji expanded my mind. It offered peace.” Above me the orange lights brightened as the green ceiling turned forest dark. A last ray of sunset hit the stained glass, lighting up the muses. St. Louis glowed, demanding no surrender.
“Pierre,” I asked softly, “why do you hate your mother?”
His glass chinked as he set it down. “She hates me. Terri. We’re just returning the favor. Of course, it’s over Lucas. As if we could have saved him. I’m sure she’ll tell you had you been there, you would have guided him out of his—” He waved his hand.
“The family must be together. To help her come to peace.”
“Yes,” Pierre said, “and to help your friend Saul save the mansion.”
“Must it be sold and torn down?”
Pierre’s light ended. Now he was dark as outside. “Yes, Lee. It’s someplace I want nothing to do with. Vess has the best idea. Build something better on its ruins. This whole city is a ruin. Just like our family.” He shrugged, uncomfortable with a long suppressed anger coming out, especially exposed to someone he thought was the enemy.
“Destroy it,” I ventured, “to make amends for Lucas?” Pierre looked at his watch, ready to take off.
“Was his suicide the breaking point?”
A quick jerk of Pierre’s head. “He was doing weird things. He introduced me to pot. Same with Terri. Then came hashish. Peyote.” Pierre shrugged. “The night of the Veiled Prophet Ball. In 1972. He argued with Mom and Dad. He wouldn’t go.” He looked at the muses. “He was out doing drugs that night. The usual street shit, so he missed the great unveiling of the Prophet.” Pierre almost grumbled. “All of that bourgeois nonsense. Mom was almost in a state of shock, of course, always ignoring Lucas’s problem. He went into the hard stuff after that night.”
“Heroin?”
“Yes, but amphetamines killed him.”
“I recall the medical report,” I said. “It was a rush of barbital and booze that did it. I’ve seen the results of that kind of cocktail when I worked the ER.”
“I’m sure you saw a lot of it.” He narrowed his eyes. “Seeing all the rich kids OD.”
“Believe me, when it comes to getting candy to escape reality, it’s a democracy out there.” He nodded.
“Margot blamed you?”
“And Dad. I was persona non grata for years. When Dad got sick, I came back, and all was forgiven.”
“But not forgotten?”
“What do you think?” Pierre searched for the right insult. “It’s all that Desouche crap. Mom and her Veiled Prophet nonsense. I think she never recovered from being crowned queen. It was its own drug, that crown. Thank God Terri had nothing to do with it.”
“I’d like to ask her.”
Pierre rose. “She hates your guts. I don’t like being this way. St. Louis … being back here brings back so much ugliness.” His voice lowered in a sad whisper. “My God, it’s a wasted, dead city. A damned corpse in cement and brick.”
I rose. “I sense you don’t want to hate me.”
He smiled wanly, matching the shadows rising along the wall. “It’s hard to be an embittered Buddhist.” He buttoned his coat. “Mother’s using this to settle scores. Don’t contest the estate, and Terri and I will cut you in.” Pierre’s parting look, although kind, was edged in cut glass. “Don’t be our enemy.”
I watched him exit into the dark.
For a moment, I pondered what I was up against, whether or not it was even possible to bring peace to my new-found family. The grand hall was an echo to that. It was beautifully restored, but I remembered when, in the seventies, Sky and I wandered through, it was abandoned and dusty. Dozens of pigeons and their mournful cooing made echoes. Sky’s cough boomed. The station was a gre
at, dusty coffin where we made tracks on the floor. It might as well have been a Roman ruin.
The city tried things. A theater company was here. It folded. Then came a mall. It was sinking. Many years later, with the prince’s kiss of corporate funding, the hall awoke and was restored. It was beautiful again, a kind of Gesshoji full of ghosts, but already people were going elsewhere. Despite impending abandonment, it was still a place of meditative light mixed with pain, because I sensed that farcical night of 1972 had something deeper to it.
11
Enter Corn Mother
The next day before I did my morning rounds, I checked my email. A message from Pierce brightened my morning. He and Antje were taking maternity classes. She was also going to Russia after Christmas.
I sighed. Antje works for a foundation in Germany that retrieves the bodies of dead German soldiers from the war so they can be buried in Der Heimat. It’s certainly not the PTA. My effusive daughter-in-law going into the steppes to find lost skeletons.
Pierce replied to my news on L’affaire Desouche.
— Does this mean we’re rich?
— I don’t want the money. I want them to be at peace. We’ve got to save the mansion. They want to destroy it. There’s bad feelings to expunge.
So before you become the angel of death, you’ve got to be the angel of peace.
— That’s it in a nutshell. Do you disagree?
— Not really, but I was looking forward to buying a private jet so we can hop over more often.
— Ha-ha. Seriously, kiddo; I’ve got my work cut out.
We logged off.
As Yul hopped on the keyboard and did his third morning yowl, the phone rang. Saul.
“Look,” he said, “can you do me a favor?”
“Sure. I assume it’s legal and not radioactive.”
“Maybe a bit of the latter.” A tense pause. “I want you to meet Sonia.”
“Meet Sonia?”
“She’s up to something. She has to be. You saw her with Pierre and Vess Moot.”
“Sure, but there is the Cahokia exhibit.”
“Lee, please.”
“Why can’t you see her?”
“I … I’d rather not.”
“Look, I know there’s history between you two, but how bad? Was there a bun in the oven? Or in this case, a croissant?”
“No. Oh, God no.” I heard noise in the background. Scraping chairs, crowd at the coffee machine kind of noise. He was giving a lecture at Washington University on urban zoning. “I just want to know what she’s up to. Can you help?”
“As long as she’s not armed and dangerous.” Pause. “Seriously.”
“Don’t worry. As long as you’re not a priceless classical artifact, you’re safe.” Saul gave me her number and hung up.
I was late, alas, due to the street crew shutting off a boulevard to plug up one of our collapsing potholes. Stinking mist hissed out of the hole, making it look like a rent in the fabric of the underworld. I hoped Sonia didn’t mind my being late.
She did.
We met at Gluten’s, a bakery cum coffeehouse downtown on Washington Street. It’s an avenue of solid brick and stone warehouses that was once the garment district, and this saved the area from being leveled in one of our fair city’s binges of urban renewal. It was being used by guys with bucks. In the seventies, I’d look up and see groups of women leaning out the windows on cigarette breaks, taking fresh air denied them in the sweatshops. Many were black until Vietnam caved, then Vietnamese faces looked out. In the late eighties, the shops went abroad for cheaper sweat, and Washington Street darkened. In the mid-nineties it was revitalized, and now teems with cafes, restaurants, and lofts for urban trendies, its street teeming with, as Tom Williams would put it, the superfluous people.
Gluten’s has a wonderful stone arch at its entrance, a fiberglass gargoyle at its side gleefully grinning, ready to drive you into hell. Sonia flanked it and frowned, tossing away her cigarette. I preferred the gargoyle.
“Fifteen minutes,” she huffed. “I cut short an interview to make this meeting.”
“Sorry,” I hedged. “the traffic—”
“You Americans have traffic like older Frenchmen have impotence.”
As I pondered what this meant and how smutty it was, we took a table. Sonia was immediately on her cell phone. A cold flash from her eyes told me to order. I asked for beignets and a breakfast fruit plate. As I waited, I thought Sonia might want some French-pressed Chicory coffee, New Orleans style. I settled for a Mocha Blanca; hot, not iced.
Sonia’s voice into the cell was sharp, pronouncing oui ‘wey’ like the French do when they’re pissed. The crowd was full of urban trendies, tapping laptops whose gentle sound mixed with the goosh of the espresso machine, everything smelling of thick coffee, fresh bread, hedge funds.
The beignets arrived, pillows of deep-fried dough with a two-inch snowfall of powdered sugar. Sonia snapped the phone shut, drank her chicory, and shrugged.
“What do you want, Mrs. Bridger?”
No point to niceties. “Why are you here?”
Her smile was fox-like and I the targeted henhouse. “Ah. You are Saul’s spy?”
“Hardly. I don’t so the Mata Hari thing, but he is curious.”
She nodded. “Saul lacks craftiness. Men like Saul never mature.”
“Mature as in being deceitful and cagey. Well, I see that as something one should grow out of, but that’s neither here nor there. The fact is, you’re a big gun in a small town. Why are you here?”
Sonia looked to one side, her sniffing implied she liked the smell of fresh bagels as much as I did. Gluten’s autumn decorations were festooned everywhere, and Sonia plucked an ear of corn from the window and held it up, its kernels tic-tac-toed from white to red.
“What does this mean to you?”
I pondered, obviously Watson to her Holmes. “Decoration. Starches. Summertime, because when I was younger and barbecued, the kids always liked roast corn …”
Sonia’s stare warned me to speak suddenly, and be brief. “Tell me.”
She stroked the ear. “To native Americans, corn was a god. The Mayans considered maize to be sacred. The Cahokians were no different.” For the first time since I’d met her, Sonia warmed. “To the native peoples, all was symmetry. Morning star was the male god, Evening star the Earth Mother. Maize grew from the body of the woman who gave birth to the creator. She was called Corn Mother. The Cahokians worshiped her.”
“She was unique to the Cahokians?”
Sonia bit into her beignet, not spilling a whiff of sugar, no doubt the same way she excavated relics. “The Cherokees called her Selu. The Aztecs Xilonen.” Sonia pronounced it ‘shelolen.’ “I theorize Corn Mother was a local goddess, and her fame was spread from Cahokia to all the Americas. This part of the world was a passage to other cultures.”
“And?”
“I believe a shrine to the goddess has yet to be discovered.”
“Here?”
Sonia nodded slowly.
“There aren’t any mounds left to such a goddess.”
“Such a shrine would more than likely be kept in a cave. In Mayan cosmology, caves were ritual places for entry to the underworld. Why should the Cahokians have been any different?”
“St. Louis has many caves.”
“Oui.” Not wey.
“Yes,” I said, “in a line south from Jefferson Avenue, there’s a ton of caves. They were used by brewers to cool and store lager. Prohibition was a field day for hiding hooch. There was even a speakeasy cave, said to be decorated in Egyptian motifs.” I ate my beignet. Sugar spilled on my blouse. I quickly brushed it away. “King Tut, meet bathtub gin.”
“Yes, Mrs. Bridger, most impressive for tourists. But the shrine—”
“All the caves are locked up. If there had been a shrine—”
“My turn to interrupt.” She was stern. I waited, contrite. “It would not be a temple found by your Indiana Jones. Merely a sim
ple grave. I believe it is here. Undiscovered. I will find it.” She slowly rubbed her seamed, thin fingers. “Saul is afraid of me,” she said with modest pride.
“What went on between you. He’s not forthcoming about Persepolis.”
“He was so innocent. I assume he hasn’t changed. His love of old buildings. History. Restoration.”
She recited these as though she were preparing a case for the prosecution. There had to be more than mere architecture, and her description of Corn Mother was intense, yet pointless. I saw no connection between an ancient legend and the mansion, nor her running around with Vess Moot.
Sonia gulped her Chicory. “Not bad. I must go. Tell Saul …” she raised her eyebrow. “He should not be afraid of superior women. Only step aside for them.”
She marched out of Gluten’s, hair flying back from the whiff of outside air. The ear of corn stared at me like an organic Maltese Falcon. She’d left me to pay the tab.
I drove south to the Altenheim on Bellerive Park, a tidy retirement center on the river where two of my patients live. It’s a relief to see the Mississippi unimpeded by the refineries and dumps that hug the shore. On the curve of the river, I passed the Anheuser-Busch brewery, its puffing smokestacks and massive brick walls denoting the one industry left in the city that is truly ours. Ein Feste Burg ist Unser Brew, one might hum.
I rang up Saul on my cellphone and filled him in.
“Mounds?” He said in disbelief. “There aren’t any mounds in St. Louis city. Maybe one or two that are the size of a shed if that, but—” he took a deep breath. “Sure, she’s here for the exhibit. That’s her baby. But why is she hobnobbing with Vess Moot?”