by Steven Clark
“The game of chunkey,” she said, “was played all over native America, another example of Cahokia’s universality. Mandans called it tchungkee. In what is now Georgia, tribes called it chenco. In the Dakotas, pain yanka ichute. The great city bringing unity to a continent. Even when it faded, remnants of it survived.”
She paused for effect, then went on to a crouching terra-cotta figure, a man with a hand on his chin, looking like Rodin’s Thinker ready to sprint.
“This,” her voice raised to the students, “is another example of effigy art, reminiscent of the Birger and Keller figurines, like them depicting a supernatural event where the natural world obeys the dictates of the gods, reflecting Cahokia’s place in the world, a harmony of commerce and harvests, of the sacred game of chunkey, the Mississippi a cord to the world above and below it.”
Sonia went on as I wondered if Cahokia was that harmonious. What about bad harvests? Surely there were some? Shamanistic power grabs? Was there a Cahokian form of busing? What about death? Was it as the Mayans believed, a return to the maize from whence man came? What about sickness? What did the nurses have to say about all this? (Of course there were nurses. There are nurses everywhere. There had to be nurses.) Were human sacrifices shrugged off as one more sop to harmony? Or was it a Jim Jones kind of world, where challenging the Big Kahuna meant a premature round of Kool-Aid? The Cahokian figure next to Sonia offered no clues. He’d been there, done that, and was too set in eternity to clue us in.
“To answer your question,” Sonia was saying to one of the students, “the discovery of Corn Mother would be of enormous archaeological and spiritual importance But those among us who see Corn Mother as some kind of pop figure to be manipulated for their own superficial ends are despicable despoilers of beauty and nobility. They are worms.”
I blinked. Again, she had turned to me as did the students, like it was my turn to be sacrificed. I slunk behind one of the display cases of ceramic jugs whose faces grinned like moviegoers. Why was I hiding?
The students tramped off. I advanced on Sonia. “Okay. What the hell and why the hell?”
Sonia cocked her head. “How dare you.”
“How dare I what?”
“Using your daughter to mock me.” From Sonia’s tunic came a crumpled brochure produced by you-know-who.
“I told you of Corn Mother, Ms. Bridger, and this is how you reward my confidence? Taking a sacred goddess—the Isis of America—and making her into a circus.”
“That’s my daughter, not me.”
“Your daughter is a charlatan.”
“Tell me about it. I had nothing to do with this.”
Sonia folded her arms. “Do you think me that simple? She is of your blood.”
“I am not Cinna the conspirator. I am Cinna the poet.”
Sonia frowned. “What?”
“Shakespeare. Julius Caesar. Sorry. I couldn’t think of any Moliere.”
The surprised glint from Sonia’s eyes meant she was wondering what kind of dames grew up along the Mississippi.
“Believe me,” I continued, “Jama’s in it for Jama. Is that what this is about? So you can rag on my kid? Well, take a number.”
Her nostrils flared, eyes moved to my purse. She sniffed. “Why do you carry that in your purse?”
I touched the ’Nduja. “The mayor gave it to me.”
Sonia’s hands went up. “Ah! So you take his favors? To gain his support?”
“No—”
“So, Mrs. Bridger. Now we have Sausagegate.”
Sausagegate? Jeesh.
She marched to the exit like a band playing in overdrive. I followed. Outside, she stopped at the platform overlooking Art Hill and lit a cigarette under the statue of Louis IX, our fair city’s namesake. Louis sat proudly on horseback, sword raised to lead an improbable crusade to conquer Forest Park. The sword gets stolen from time to time, making our namesake appear to be shaking his fist. Stop thief!
Fanning below Louis was Art Hill and the T-shaped lagoon, where gushed the Cascades of the World’s Fair, that magical time when St. Louis was adored by nation and world. In the lagoon, plumes of water splashed up, watery stumps matching the barren trees of the park. Eastward rose the tower of the Chase Park Plaza, lonely in that winter way. The way of ruins.
“Look,” I said as Sonia leaned against the wall and puffed, “I’m not getting favors from the mayor. If anything, he’s on your side. Go forth and search for Corn Mother, but don’t wreck the mansion.”
She paused and gazed on the winter scene. “The mansion is only a bourgeois relic that serves no purpose. Everything is a process, from trading fur to industrialization to corporate domination.” She blew out smoke. Naturally, the wind whipped it into my face. “Corn Mother and her world are timeless. A complete society, waiting to be rediscovered. Like the cities of Troy were after ages of neglect.”
“You and Corn Mother are being used by others to settle scores.” The curl of Sonia’s lips and probing eyes showed amusement, not anger. “I wonder of your intentions. I know about Persepolis.”
“From Saul, of course.”
I nodded. “You stole an artifact.”
“I was saving one, Mrs. Bridger. If I must make deals to get Corn Mother, I shall. Hundreds of mansions have been destroyed. One more won’t make any difference.”
She dropped her cigarette and crushed it. Black hair strayed from her head like cut strings from a harp.
“So many mounds lost. The great mound in St. Louis, that of Cote Brilliante, was remarked upon in the early days of settlement. Despite being sacred, it was leveled. It is my moral destiny to save the collective memory of humankind. Shit. It is cold.”
So it was. Bare trees and open skies gave the wind free reign. No Meet Me in St. Louis on a bleak day like this. Sonia stared at two far-off golfers bundled as they prepared to putt. She frowned at my sausage.
“You will take the andouille home?”
“It’s ’Nduja.”
She smirked. “’Nduja originated in Calabria, but in France, we make it into andouille. Smoked and seasoned with garlic and wine. It aids digestion.”
I silently noted the Gallic desire to refine anything Italian into something more dignified.
“Also, in France we say one is an andouille if they are a rascal.” She narrowed her eyes. “Your daughter is an andouille.” Sonia strode back in to the museum.
I had a date with my sausage.
Delmar Boulevard is University City’s main drag. Spillover from neighboring Washington University, the black neighborhoods that blossomed nearby when the Jews moved out and yuppies moved in for bar hopping make its streets at once glitzy and funky lively. The shops run the gamut from tacky to vegan, with the resultant odors. Embedded in Delmar’s sidewalks are the bronze stars of St. Louis celebrities, from William Clark to Dizzy Gillespie. While the Central West End apes New York and its townhouse dignity, Delmar is an L.A. wannabe.
I passed street musicians who tootled and drummed away, muffled in army surplus greatcoats and wool hats. They smelled of pot, and I hoped they were stoned. It would dull the cold. Tennessee Williams lived here, and hated it. He described U. City as “an ugly region of hive-like apartment buildings, for the most part, and fire escapes and pathetic little patches of green among concrete driveways.” I sighed and admired city hall in the distance. Like an octagonal confection with a cookie jar lid, the building was a bit of World’s Fair exuberance that would make a wonderful tower for any Rapunzel the Veiled Prophet wanted to keep. It’s a woman’s building, as I once explained to a younger Jama. She hadn’t understood.
“Why do you call it a woman’s building?” she’d frowned. I remember her flipping her hair, with curious, preteen eyes as we passed the stone lions flanking the steps. “You mean there’s a beauty shop here?”
“Oh, Childe Fantastical,” I’d replied, pulling the heavy doors open. “Look up. See how the staircase winds around? See all the curves?”
Jama tipped her hea
d back and turned like a spool. She admired the pair of bronze maids flanking the base of the stairs, their bodies post-Victorian; slender and curved like medieval ivory carvings of the Virgin.
“Yeah,” nodded Jama as she pulled up the left loose strap from her sun dress, “and they got light bulbs in their hair.”
The maids did indeed, like Edison tiaras. “Back then,” I said, “you bragged about electricity. You flaunted it. Like the photos I showed you of the World’s Fair.”
“Okay, Mom. So that makes it a woman’s building?” Her tone indicated doubt.
An adding machine clicked at the clerk’s office. I pointed up. “See the ceiling. All of those women? Lewis—the man who founded U. City—made this headquarters of a women’s magazine. It was going to be a national center for women.”
“Like what? Seventeen?”
“Women as in Ms. As in ruling the world.” Jama gave another shrug at bor-ing stuff.
I was pretty frank about my feminism, and wanted it passed down. “Come around here.”
She followed me to the other side. Under a glass case was a model of University City, and I pointed out what Lewis originally planned. A Gothic church. A Parthenon. A Taj Mahal. An Egyptian temple, all lined up like an inspection of architectural grandeur, a miniature world’s fair. Her nose touched the glass case, leaving a smudge.
“So this is U. City? Don’t look like it.”
“Well, some of it is. Lewis, who built the city, ran out of money and was charged with mail fraud.”
Jama’s eyes lit up from dutiful to scavenging. “Neat. So he was a crook. They get him?”
“He took off for California. They didn’t get him.”
She sighed at the model. “Coulda built a Taj Mahal. That would have brought elephants. Better than that Jewish church.”
“Synagogue.”
“Yeah,” she stretched. “Jew City, right?”
That was U. City’s nickname. “Let’s not say that.”
“Elephants,” Jama nodded. “So where we gonna eat?”
And that had been that. Her interest had not been captivated by architecture, but by crooks and elephants. And so it goes.
I stepped over Auguste Chouteau’s star when I stopped at the stairwell squeezed between the pungent smell from a coffeehouse and the funk offerings of a resale shop. The door opened, and boots clabbered down the stairs, two chattering Goth girls in nose jewelry and fashionably ripped jeans brusqued past, Corn Mother brochures in their hands.
At the top, Jama confronted me. She was still wearing the leather coat, eyes warning battle stations.
“You’re not coming up,” she warned. “What do you want?”
I showed her the brochure. “The website went up quick.”
She shrugged. “A site can go up in hours. I found good people who work cheap. Lots of unemployed people in graphics and computers around here.”
“Did you inform them of your habit of skipping out when payroll is due?” Jama sneered and pulled up her collar “Ah, I see why I’m forbidden the office.”
She walked past me, gesturing I follow her onto the street.
“This is different. It’s like a new religion. After my spot on Jack Mack, I got hundreds of hits on the website.”
“Speaking of which, I almost disowned you for that crack about my making casseroles.”
“Sure, be petty. But your psyche’s got ‘casserole’ written all over it.”
I ignored that dime-store analysis. “A new religion? Are we going to do Joseph Smith and have an angel with gold plates? Or do we do CDs now?”
Jama looked away. “What’s the point of talking? You don’t believe me.”
“I wonder why.”
“I’m not a crook,” Jama said in Nixonian dignity. “Corn Mother is getting people buzzing. People need a natural faith.”
“With fewer calories, I take it. Last time we locked horns, you were into Kabbalah.”
“Kabbalah’s out. Native American is coming back. It’s the great spirit. Oneness. The true opium of the people.”
We just stepped on William Burroughs. “I really wouldn’t put it that way.”
“I mean opium in a good way. A mind enhancing way. Look, you always denied it, but I have a spiritual oneness with life. The parts I played enlightened me.”
“Oh sure,” I said as we stepped on Phyllis Diller’s star, “you’re playing Sister Mary Amnesia in Nunsense makes you Thomas Aquinas.” I rolled my eyes. “Dinner theater.”
“Hey. It ran for fifteen weeks, and it was a paycheck.” Jama checked herself in a storefront window, dusty at its edges, a store that sold retro. Mannequins wore fifties clothes; wide skirts with little white collars that said Eisenhower puritan.
“I’ve done the math, kiddo, and here’s my equation. You’re trying out Corn Mother for its debut in L.A. Like Jim Jones did. First Indiana, then San Francisco. Ending in Kool-Aid.”
Jama’s eyes shifted. “It was Flavor Aid. As everyone knows.”
I shrugged. “You’ll make some boodle out of it, pay off Rasheed, and keep fleecing. It won’t work.”
Her smirk was a Lauren Bacall up-yours. “People are hungry for a goddess. Corn Mother is like … an inner climax. She’s like sex.”
We stepped on Masters and Johnson. “It won’t work.”
“I’ve already raised sixteen thou.”
“You can’t go out and become the First Church of Jama, and—” I blinked. “Sixteen thousand. So soon?”
Her lips and eyes shone in a facial touché. “The ’net’s bringing them in. I’m doing my fourth lecture in two days.” She shrugged. “Some old timers like to go face-to-face.”
In my head, the math was doing itself. “By the end of the month, you could pay off Rasheed.” I shook my head. “The IRS won’t let you keep it. Rasheed’s a dark ride.”
Jama almost clucked. “That tough guy shtick. I told you, he’s a drama llama.”
“You’re doing me no good. Do you know Sonia Sauvage?”
“What’s she been in?”
“No movie. She’s one of the baddies after the mansion. She called you an andouille. It’s a sausage. And a put-down.”
“That why you’re carrying one around in your purse? You must love me after all.”
I didn’t say anything. We stopped on Tennessee William’s star in front of Blueberry Hill. In its corner window was a train set model of Delmar, lit up like the store displays I saw as a girl at Famous-Barr at Christmas time. It’s set up to hawk a planned trolley for Delmar to Forest Park, that will of course revive the city, bring in business, yaddayaddayadda. Compact buildings and toy people, like the model in the lobby of U. City Hall I’d shown Jama. On an oblong track, a toy streetcar circled and circled. Named Desire?
“Jama,” I said. “Stop doing this.”
“You mean what I always do, don’t you? Try to make a life for myself. Like, Pierce is the good son, with the brains who cleans his room. Dots his i’s.” Jama’s eyes hardened. “And I’m the wayward daughter. The fuck-up.”
My stomach muscles tightened. “Jama, I never thought of you that way.” I tried not to lie. “I’ve always been proud of you, but this is bad. It’s not some elephant ride.”
She snarled a laugh. “I wish you could hear yourself. I didn’t want to be a goddamned liberated doctor or savior. After all, that’s your job. Fucking Supermom.”
My jaw tightened. “That’s not how it’s been, and you know it.”
“I gotta go.” Jama pulled her coat closer. It was early evening. You could smell snow in the air. Kids bumped past us on their way to bars, restaurants, and the art house cinema down the street. She walked off, then turned, how else? Dramatically. “You’re just a jackal. Always a jackal.”
I took a deep breath as Jama marched back to her office. Faces glanced at the word like it was a curse. ‘Bitch’ or ‘asshole’ would have been ignored.
I chilled when I turned, seeing Rasheed step up, pretending to glance through a brochu
re of Corn Mother. His eyes showed a cutting pleasure in my wariness, then glanced at the ’Nduja.
“More food, Mrs. Bridger. Interesting.”
“Look. She’s trying,” I said, albeit cautiously. “She’s raising money.”
Rasheed’s eyes were those of a patient tiger staking out the waterhole. “Money she will doubtless put into her movie. About the elephant.” He dropped the pamphlet. “Jama should have written one about cats.” He melted into the crowd. Shoes and boots soiled the brochure. Neon reflected on the pavement like a spilled rainbow.
It was a quick drive to the mansion. I felt guilty as hell neglecting Margot, and rushed past Rainer as he opened the door.
“She’s wondered where you’ve been,” he called as I started up the stairs. “But I knew you were—”
I stopped and turned, ready for a whiff of sarcastic grape shot. “Up to no good?”
The door clicked as Rainer locked it. “Up to what you thought was some good.”
He looked away. It was a kind of victory for him. I went straight to Margot’s bedroom. Soft music played on her bedside radio. She brightened when I came in, and I let my purse slump on the nearest table and checked her vitals before removing my coat.
“So sorry,” I said.
Margot gazed back. “So, is that a salami in your purse, or are you just happy to see me?” My pause made her quietly chuckle.
“Ike and I used to say things like that to each other. Silly, corny jokes. He picked up a lot from movies or flying buddies. Why do you have a salami? It smells like garlic.”
“It’s ’Nduja. The mayor gave it to me. Don’t ask.”
“Very well, but I will about the meeting. How did it go?”
“Not encouraging. He’s sorry, but Vess—” My voice trailed off as she pointed to the bathroom. I helped her out of bed and got her robe.
“It’s not Vess,” she sighed, “but Pierre and Terri. The money changers in the temple.” Outside the window, fog drifted low, making everything the color of dirty pearl. Margot narrowed her eyes. “I know they hired a very nasty firm to challenge the will. They’re absolute sharks on inheritance law.”