by Peter Straub
“Crème de cacao,” I answered, giggling.
An angel’s kiss….
Sunday afternoons, after the Cocoa Club shakedown, I poured and mixed the Angel’s Kisses carefully. I set them on a tray inlaid with opal dragons that wound round it like the painted twin on Lana’s neck. Then I took them on tiptoe to her boudoir. Stolen sips of Angel’s Kisses. I used to think in sweet rapture: she’s like that. An Angel’s Kiss, as pure as bliss….
Mother, lying in bed with a sleeping mask strewn on the sheets like a leftover from a masquerade, sipped her drink. “Mmm. Just the thing for that Mood Indigo,” she confided.
“The mood indigo?”
Shadow of a smile. “Mood Indigo, baby.”
Through Mother’s bedroom window I watched Cassandra Caiola click-click-click down the front walk in high heels and a Christian Dior suit. Her hair was pulled tightly back from her made-up face, not a strand out of place. She paused, frowning, fastening the little buttons on her gloves. I’d never seen her go anywhere without those gloves. Perfect and pristine and white as ice. She called Daddy’s name sharply as she unlocked the door to her Cadillac, so shiny you could see your reflection in it. White, just like her gloves.
White ice melting red flame, burning the glass, the two as one.
Mother and Cassandra: fire and ice.
I watched Daddy amble out of the house and toss his cigarette on the sidewalk. Slouch his hat forward. Slam.
“You know that wasn’t our arrangement, Joe.” Backing out. “You said you wanted the brat. And far be it for me to stand in your way, especially since you’d already knocked her up. Though God only knows what that one will turn—” squeal of rubber “—with a mother like—” Frosted lips in a rearview mirror.
Daddy not looking at her. Tapping a rhythm on the dash.
“You know what an understanding woman I am, Joe. You know I am. But I’ve had just about enough of living right next door to that—that—”
Sigh. “Why don’t you just let me go, then, Cassandra.”
We never heard the reply as the Cadillac peeled down the driveway.
Lana lay languidly in bed. She lifted her glass. “To sweethearts and wives,” she said wryly. “May they never meet.”
The Angel’s Kiss.
Full on the lips.
It was time that carried me to Whispering Pines and the place where my mother lay wrapped in her past like a skein of stars. It was time, chased by that ghost of a song I couldn’t quite remember, and couldn’t quite forget. And now I stood with the iron door swinging wide behind me.
The wet northern California wind blew at my back, bringing with it a smattering of soaked oak leaves. Inside the crypt it was dim, but there was still a little dying light. I knew I’d be able to see what I needed to see.
I had to see Mother’s rich red lips while Sinatra sang the word and Lana spoke it with that terrible hurt, that desperate pleading in her eyes. One word.
One sweet word of love
For a moment I wasn’t sure if the suitcase record player I’d left for her would still be there. Somehow, I’d always imagined otherworldly hands spiriting it and Lana away, at last, to that elusive Mediterranean isle. But there it was, as it had waited in the vault the last four decades. Beside it, beneath a thick layer of dust, lay the laminated cover of Frank Sinatra’s Come Fly with Me. Old Blue Eyes, now dust himself, his voice echoing in a tomb.
I picked up the record. It smelled of damp, of decay, of shut-in places. But in my mind, a song rang out that was gay and swinging, a song that was really going somewhere. A song brimming with sparkling vino and Italian palazzos and illicit romance. It was the song that once carried me away to a villa on the Isle of Capri, an isle of tangerine sunsets and whispered words of love.
I stood with my eyes closed, swaying to a song I heard only in memory. And, swaying, I remembered at last the song I had forgotten.
The weeklies sizzled with stories of Mother tossing full glasses of champagne in men’s faces. Stories of stinging slaps that rang through the room. Her fits of temper were legendary, as was her childish pouting, her brooding silences and black depressions when she’d scratch the needle across “The Isle of Capri” again and again. Sometimes Daddy would walk in whistling some tune kicking around in his head, all unsuspecting with hands in his pockets, and she’d spring like a cobra. Back him into a corner. He’d grin at her and throw up his hands in surrender, and she’d spit out, “Joe, you really are a sonofabitch.” Then she’d kiss him hard and bite his lip until it bled.
It was a savage dance, that give and take of love they had, stronger and wilder than any act the Cocoa Club had ever witnessed. No one was particularly surprised when Lana Lake and Joe Caiola turned up dead in a pool of red on her kitchen floor. A man between two houses, between two worlds—ice-cold wife in one, red-hot mistress and child in the other. Maybe Mrs. Joe Caiola could put up with an “arrangement” like that, but not a wildcat like Lana Lake. People like Lana, their passions boiled over like a pot of sauce on the stove.
I remember everything about that moment: Lana’s chili-pepper-red toreador pants…the smell of Daddy’s favorite Napoli spaghetti sauce bubbling like Mount Vesuvius before a blast…the pungent odor of garlic and garden oregano and Roma tomatoes the color of arterial blood…the gun on the floor by Lana’s bare feet. Red lacquer, chipped on the pinkie.
I remember the pain and horror in Mother’s eyes, the silent pleading, the grasping fingers, the choking sound she made as she tried to speak….
I tried to picture that kitchen now: blood that had pooled and seeped into linoleum now badly discolored. Knife on a butcher block where decades-old onions had shriveled up like blackened flies. An apron stained with sauce the color of blood, and an icebox filled with dried-out spaghetti. A forty-year-old menu that never changed.
Old Blue Eyes hit it on the head: She wore a lovely meatball on her finger.
It turned out Daddy had been shot through the heart with a bullet from the same .22 automatic Tino Alvarez gave Lana to protect herself from the nuts who were always hitting on her at the club. She’d even used it once, shot a man in the crotch without an ounce of remorse. Clutching the bloody mess in his pants he’d stumbled to the bar on the corner where he soused what was left of his manhood in a glass of scotch because a guy there told him he’d heard somewhere it made a pretty good disinfectant. The screams were heard clear to the next county.
So the story ran, anyhow…. The tabloids had a parade with it. Mother was acquitted and after that, everyone in town knew about the .22 locked in the nightstand. Everyone. And men knew better than to tangle with Lana Lake.
Everyone also knew how Mother wanted Joe Caiola all to herself for years, and how things would never, ever be the way she wanted them, not while Cassandra was kicking up her little white pumps in protest. It was the standard story: one too many nights, one too many fights. And it wasn’t too hard for people to picture Lana storming off to the bedroom in tears, banging open the nightstand, fumbling around for the gun….
Maybe she’d even meant to go after Cassandra, but it never got as far as that. Somehow the gun went off. Lana herself was probably as surprised as hell. And what was left now with Joe lying dead on the floor? Snake eyes, no matter which way you rolled it, and nothing left to do but squeeze the trigger one more time.
Don’t cry, Joe.
Let her go, let her go, let her go…
God, let him go.
What do you say, baby…you and me on the Isle of Capri….
Don’t joke, Joe.
I thought a lot about that gun. About Mrs. Joe Caiola. About how Cassandra had bought our house the day after the funerals. It stood there for the next forty years. Boarded up, falling into disrepair, a sprawling bungalow choked in a stranglehold of climbing vines as thick as a dragon’s body. The vines bled green in the rain, and the rain seeped into the ground.
Over the years I’d often wondered how the sunlight would look as it filtered through the w
indowpanes in the house where, once upon a time, I’d danced in a dream. Heavy, still green light that made everything look as though you were seeing it through a glass-bottomed boat, a sleepy lagoon.
It was a haunted house in every sense, wrapped in its secrets, and its faded Chinese screens, and its un-drunk bottles of crème de cacao, now crystallized sugar. All those unmixed Angel’s Kisses.
Sweetcream dreams, sour-curdled by time.
I don’t know how long I stood like that in the tomb, but when I opened my eyes it was almost dark and Sinatra’s smile was a flicker in the moonlight. I put the record down. Touched the casket wrapped in its sensuous cloak of dust. I held my breath as I lifted the lid—carefully, carefully—and the dust fell from it in sparkles, the spent lanterns of weary fireflies.
There were those who said that Lana Lake was buried naked in the sapphire-blue mink stole Joe Caiola had once draped over her milk-white shoulders. Confession magazine reported, with more than a hint of morality, that they had buried her in her g-string.
I tried to imagine that g-string, swinging across the cavern of my mother’s caved-in pelvis, a glittering rope bridge over a sea of peacock feathers now powdered to iridescent dust.
I didn’t know for certain what I would find in that box.
But my breath caught in my throat when I saw her hair. Still red as blood. Dried blood. I thought of the heart I had made all those years ago, that childish cathedral of paper and wire, now rusted away. My eyes drifted down to the bird-of-paradise I’d twisted between her fingers, entwined swan necks. A ghost of fragrance still lingered in the withered blooms. I blinked back the tears that balanced on my lashes.
God weeps no tears for dead whores, Capri.
I made myself look.
Down.
There, there.
I couldn’t help it: my eyes misted as I stared at the beaded vertebrae that shone like a strand of luminescent pearls, pearl upon shimmering pearl. Concentric layers of secrets. God in heaven, she was so beautiful, even now.
She whispered softly, “It’s best not to linger,”
Then as I kissed her hand I could see
And now I did see. Trembling, I slipped my hand beneath the delicate spinal column.
She wore a plain golden ring on her finger
’Twas goodbye on the Isle of Capri
There. On the satin lining.
A plain golden ring, sucked off the hand of a dead man and trapped for forty years in the throat of the woman who loved him.
A plain golden ring.
It was the last verse of the song. The verse I couldn’t remember.
Until now.
And now I remembered everything. The pain and horror in Mother’s eyes, the pleading, the grasping fingers, the choking sound she made as she tried to speak….
It wasn’t horror in her eyes, but fear. Fear that even her own daughter would misunderstand the deaths that had come too soon. And now I knew what my mother had been trying to tell me that copper autumn afternoon so long ago. One word:
“Capri,” she had said. Capri….
But it wasn’t my name she whispered with those lush red lips. Not a beg for forgiveness, a plea for understanding. It was the name of the song: “The Isle of Capri.”
And then, standing there at my mother’s casket, I knew what it was she’d tried to tell me but couldn’t. Couldn’t—because a wedding ring engraved with the name of a murderess had lodged in her windpipe like a piece of candy and stolen her voice.
Forever Cassandra.
And that plain golden ring had never been found.
The police, and the courts, and the press, and the people, had all believed Mrs. Caiola. And why shouldn’t they? She was beautiful, an ice goddess sitting there in the witness stand in her black Christian Dior and veiled hat, wringing her gloved hands, with just the appropriate touch of widow’s wetness in her eyes.
Not the same set of gloves she’d had on when she shot first her husband, then his mistress, before spinning smartly on her high heels and click-click-clicking out of the kitchen. Always the perfect lady, that particular pair of gloves had been neatly disposed of. One, two, three. As easy as that. Ring-a-ding-ding.
Except the mistress hadn’t died quite so quickly as the husband. The mistress had time for one last kiss, a kiss that would name her murderess.
Forty years later.
Dabbing her eyes, careful not to smudge her mascara, Cassandra explained to the court that she and Joe had reconciled, that he’d gone to Lana Lake’s to tell her once and for all he wanted nothing more to do with her, that he was suing for custody of his daughter on the grounds that Lana was an unfit mother, and that Cassandra, awaiting his return, had heard the gunshots all the way across the garden. It was Cassandra who had called the police.
Everyone pitied the little girl sitting there in her black woolen uniform beside Sister Constance-Evangeline of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Capri Lake, the daughter of the whore, with her downcast eyes and burning cheeks and hands locked on her lap like a heart without a key.
And what a kind and generous woman was Cassandra Caiola to welcome into her own home, with open arms, the illegitimate child of her husband’s mistress.
It was how Joe would have wanted it, Mrs. Caiola explained. She had never been able to have children of her own. He would have wanted her to raise the child as her own flesh and blood to be a respectable and decent young lady. And everyone’s heads nodded in sympathetic agreement, and Cassandra smiled to herself, and in that moment, the course of my life changed forever.
Forever Cassandra.
A hand clad in an ice-white glove that smelled of Chanel No. 5 closed around a wrist braceleted with ruby tears. I was led numbly down the courtroom steps through a mill of people and reporters and photographers with flashbulbs. There was a controlled yet agonizing wrench of my arm socket as I ducked my head into the shining white Cadillac, and Cassandra Caiola drove us silently back to a house without dancing, without song, without love.
It took time to learn the music of silence.
It took my life.
But little by little, Cassandra Caiola became Mother to me. For I have always lived in the house without music.
God weeps no tears for dead whores, Capri. God weeps no tears.
Little by little, with Sister Constance-Evangeline’s compassionate guidance.
God weeps no tears, Capri. God weeps no tears.
And eventually I, too, wept no more. And Cassandra Caiola at last heard me whisper the word she wanted so desperately to hear—
one sweet word of love
And truly, there was no sweeter revenge for Cassandra Caiola than to hear the word whore on the lips of Lana Lake’s daughter. She made me say it again and again, a record without end, until she laughed and laughed out loud and tears sprang to her eyes, because this was music to her ears like no other music could be. It was the only music I ever heard again.
At least, it seemed that way for a very long time. But in the end it was the song that drew me back. The song that gave me my name and flowed in my veins, the song that drew me back to what I had lost. Back to the house of dancing, and singing, and life.
Back to the Isle of Capri.
Thunder shattered a sky as dark as wet satin. The moon was a weeping eye.
“Is that you?”
Not once had I heard her say my name. Capri. She couldn’t stand to say it.
“Where have you been all this time? Close the door, it’s cold.”
I said nothing as I shook the rain from my hair. My hair was a light strawberry blond that had never darkened to the luxurious auburn of my mother’s. I hadn’t inherited her beautiful hair, or her talent for dance, or her brazen love of exhibition.
Her fiery temper was, in me, a slow-burning ember.
Red flame melting white ice.
Cassandra Caiola sat stiffly in the straight-backed chair that looked down on Lana Lake’s bungalow. Living her life through the windowpane as she had for for
ty years.
Rain sluiced through the leaves of the towering eucalyptus trees. Decades of dead leaves and blue gum mulched into the ground with mounds of peeling bark. The house seemed like it was slowly sinking. Dissolving into nothing.
Some nights, the moonlight danced on the minty leaves like silver drops of water, and the breeze swished through them like Daddy’s brushes, and we’d listen to them, Cassandra and I, in our chairs by the window, in the house without music.
And on other nights, like tonight, the wind rattled through the trees and a litter of hard-shelled fruit clattered on the tiled roof like an iron drum, and we’d listen, ba da da, in the house without music.
Cassandra’s head nodded in memory. Her eyes were almost closed. The sky was clear now, and I stared at her profile in bas-relief, white as marble in the moonlight.
I thought of the angel and its features of stone, and I wondered what was in Cassandra’s heart. But for stone angels and dead whores there are no regrets, no remorse, no dreams to torment deep into the night. There is no laughter, no music, no dancing. No dream of an Isle of Capri…
In this light, Cassandra’s eyes had no color of their own. They were the color of eucalyptus leaves reflected in Lana’s bedroom window.
“What’s that on your lips?” she demanded.
Crushed red beetles, the juice of wild pomegranates, a whore’s lipstick, Napoli spaghetti sauce, something else, something red—
In my mind I heard a shot ring out as if it were yesterday. I saw Lana run screaming into the kitchen, a half-tied apron on her hips, slipping on blood and chili peppers in a grotesque dance, a balance of life. I saw the spreading crimson stain on the floor as she cradled Daddy’s head in her lap.
I saw her lips, full and red.
I saw the rich, wet kiss of one who had loved deeply.
I had never kissed nor been kissed.
Now I kissed the woman who had been my mother for forty years.