Nameless Dame, page 22
“I think he’s going to hang on, Eileen. There’s something he wants to tell us. I couldn’t make out much that he said. He’s hooked up to all those damn machines. I know he loves you.”
Mrs. Cust was sobbing again. “Thank you, Poesy.”
“You just have to take it easy, Eileen. Do you have a poet you’re working on now?”
The poor woman sniffled for a moment and then answered, “Gerard Manley Hopkins.”
“Who could be better? I couldn’t think of a better poet for your needs.”
But Mrs. Cust wasn’t thinking about Hopkins any longer. “Oh, that damn man,” she cried, “he was always trouble. I don’t know if you’re aware of our history, since you’re relatively new to the area. We went out during high school in Sebastopol. I’ve never kept this a secret, but when I got pregnant, my father forced us to marry. Then I lost the baby. That pretty much says it all about our relationship—it’s been a long, lousy ride to nowhere.
“And that man, always running around and, I’m ashamed to tell you this, roughing me up pretty badly. Here I am telling you everything, as if you were my minister.”
“It’s alright,” Sabbatini said, his voice soothing. “At times like this, we must take comfort where we can.”
“But then last fall, something snapped. I didn’t know what it was. Gordon seemed content for the first time in years. He was gone a lot in the evenings, but when he got home he’d be quite pleasant. Then I realized that the man was in love. I hired somebody to tail him. You understand that in my position, I can’t be the last person to discover things. This was about six months ago. It didn’t take any time at all to find out whom Gordon was consorting with.”
At this point, as I flipped the flat bread in the frying pan, I realized that Sabbatini had truly become the woman’s confessor.
“At first I didn’t want to believe it,” she said, “even though I was handed incontrovertible proof. I suppose I went through all the stages of grief. You know, denial and all the rest. But finally I accepted the fact that my husband had fallen in love with a common whore. Don’t get me wrong—I had sympathy for Ruthie Rosenberg when she first went astray. She was such a beautiful child. I knew her father well. A fine Jewish man. He tried so hard to make his little business in Guerneville thrive. He had no luck. He did everything for that child. Look what it got him. He was the one I really had sympathy for. Thank God he died before he saw what became of her.”
I was so intent on listening to Mrs. Cust that the teakettle took me by surprise when it started whistling. I cut the spinach flatbread into pieces and put them on a plate, and then broke open a couple of satsuma tangerines and arranged them on another plate with a sliced Bosc pear that I’d given a good squeeze of fresh lime.
Thirteen Epiphanies
Once I walked into the big room with the repast, Mrs. Cust exclaimed, “And look what Gordon did to poor Mr. Boyer.”
“Don’t worry about Augie,” Sabbatini said. “If I’ve ever known a resilient man, it’s Augie Boyer.”
“Yes, don’t bother worrying about me, Mrs. Cust.” I put the plates down and grabbed the teapot. “I’ll be right back with some fresh tea.”
Before I could retreat to my listening post in the kitchen, Sabbatini grabbed my arm. “And the thing about Augie is, he fully appreciates the healing power of poetry. Who are you reading now, man?”
“Wallace Stevens,” I said, hoping to throw Sabbatini a curve.
“Wallace Stevens, what a great find for you, Augie. You know I have a rancher in Petaluma who’s reading Stevens. At the Friday morning group a couple of weeks back, this guy claimed he was so affected by Stevens’s ‘Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird’ that he vowed to stop shooting the wild turkeys that wreak havoc on his property.”
I shot Sabbatini as wry a smile as I could manage with a broken face. “But, Bobby, what happens when the wild turkeys return and wreak havoc on his property? Isn’t your rancher going to blame it on poetry?”
“No way, Augie. Once a man has really heard a poem—you know this—he’s found something he’s not going to relinquish. And for this man, Baron Rush, who had never looked at the world in this kind of way, that poem was nothing less than an epiphany. No, thirteen epiphanies.”
Although he addressed me, Sabbatini nodded to Mrs. Cust as he spoke. Even in his Sufi-wear, he had the aspect of a born-again minister on good terms with God. Which, of course, was true, if you allow that his God was poetry. Anyway, what was the point of trying to slow down Bobby Sabbatini, the beloved Poesy? I nodded to Mrs. Cust, slipped away with the spent teapot, and was soon joined in the kitchen by Blossom and Milosz.
Food Fight
Blossom stuck Milosz back in his high chair, still littered with half-masticated Cheerios. She scrambled an egg for him and gave him a spoon and a little tub of applesauce with a shake of cinnamon. Meanwhile, I shook some raw almonds into a small bowl and built a little mound of crystallized ginger on a chipped saucer.
“How can we get rid of her,” Blossom complained, “if you keep feeding her, and Bobby just stays out there holding her hand? I mean, he’s treating her like she’s the widow in some 1930s stage play.”
“The woman’s husband is dying.”
“The world will be a better place for it.”
“How did you get to be such a cold-blooded creature, Blossom?”
“Worked at it, of course. But, come on, how long does he have to go on with this stage drama?”
“Don’t you get it, Blossom? She’s talking. She’s spilling what she’s got and she happens to have a lot. Don’t forget, Bobby was a detective for twenty-five years. He needs to enable her.”
“Yeah, well, she’s already fully enabled.”
“He’s not,” I said, and pointed to Milosz, who couldn’t get the little spoon in his mouth, but was doing a hell of a job flinging applesauce all over the room.
Blossom started cheering her boy on. “Isn’t he cute?”
“You’re encouraging him.”
“Why the fuck not? Isn’t he doing exactly what he’s supposed to do?”
“I thought he was supposed to get some of the applesauce in his mouth.”
“Does he look like a boy who’s starving? No way. And besides, he’s got bigger fish to fry. His curiosity is running rampant and that’s the thing he has to satisfy. It’s hard to believe you were ever a father, Augie.”
“Hey,” I said, with a sharper edge of defensiveness than I expected, “I was a good father. I just didn’t encourage infant anarchy.”
“There is no such thing. Milosz is doing exactly what he should be doing—experimenting with physics, exploring the properties of gravity. Look at him with that spoon; he’s invented a fucking missile launcher.”
Milosz, impervious to us, was giggling with pleasure. Blossom planted a small bunch of smooches on the top of his head. Then she kicked into baby talk. “Oh, you are so precocious. Yes, you are. Just a year and a half, and you’re ready for your first major food fight.”
“Very cool,” I said, and then played what I thought was my trump card, “but guess who gets to clean it up.”
After refilling Milosz’s tub of applesauce from the big jar and sprinkling it again with cinnamon, Blossom looked back at me over her shoulder and said, “I’ll have the wife clean it up.”
“What wife? Is Bobby your wife?”
“No, Quince is back.”
I started to get agitated. “What are you talking about? She was never your wife in the first place. That was fiction, Blossom. That was you guys just fucking with my head.”
“Well, she wants to do the wife thing now, for real. We had a little powwow back there. You know, she’s left the casino company.”
“Yeah, but that doesn’t mean she’s going to stay around here and be your slave.”
“Quince said that after being out here for a while, she could see the importance of Bobby’s work. She really wants to support it.”
“Bullshit.”
“I think it was the book of Rumi poems that Bobby laid on her. Yeah, that was the catalyst. And you know what else she said? She said she’s really fond of you, smashed-up face and everything.”
I wanted to scream, but it was the precocious boy in the high chair who started hollering. He’d tossed his tub of applesauce, and now that it had splattered on the floor, he wanted it back.
I looked over at Blossom. She was beaming. “Did you see how far he threw that, Augie? Oh, I wish Bobby had seen that. I think we have ourselves a ballplayer.”
Fly on the Wall
I fled to the main room with the nuts and ginger and was surprised to see Sabbatini sitting beside Mrs. Cust on the mohair couch. When I put the plates down in front of her, Mrs. Cust nodded to me as if I were a servant.
“I’m sitting here gorging myself,” she said, “and he keeps bringing more food.”
It was a struggle to behave. I wanted to stick my tongue out at the woman. I was tired of being obsequious, sick of having my mind fucked with by just about everybody in this hallowed community. But I was also curious to hear what else Mrs. Cust had to say. It had gotten cold in the cabin. The fire was down to embers and I took some time rebuilding it. That done, I perched on the stool in front of it.
Mrs. Cust, as I hoped, carried on like I wasn’t even there, and I achieved a status I’d always hoped for—fly on the wall. I studied Mrs. Cust for a moment, thinking again that she’d been the woman I’d noticed the night before, spelling REPENT multiple times on the signboard outside First Christ River of Blood. It struck me as such an odd time of night to be changing the sign. Maybe she’d just returned from visiting her dying husband at the hospital in Sebastopol.
The lanky woman pinched her mouth into a knot and then aimed her tongue at a molar, perhaps trying to free a wedged nugget of ginger. “I was told by my private investigator,” she said, “that she was working out of a massage joint in Monte Rio called McCluhan’s. The county’s tried to close the place down a number of times because of reports of prostitution. Anyway my investigator—aren’t you at all curious who I hired, Poesy?”
Sabbatini shook his head. “Only if you want me to know, Eileen.”
“Well, it’s Benjamin Pozniak over in Forestville. To think that I knew him when he was a kid and now he knows all there is to know about my dirty underwear.”
“Oh, I know Ben,” Sabbatini said. “Not to worry. He’s a professional. He comes to my Tuesday morning group. Nice fella. He’s working very hard on a long poem by Philip Levine.”
“Benjamin tells me that that little harlot was paid by the casino people to work exclusively for Gordon. It’s as if he had her on retainer. And you understand why the casino people were picking up the tab?”
“They wanted Gordon to persuade you to support the casino plan.”
“Exactly. A man is bribed with a live whore to get his wife to comply. Isn’t that rich?”
Mrs. Cust paused to stuff a handful of almonds and a couple of lumps of crystallized ginger into her mouth. Sabbatini took the opportunity to shrug and make a goofy face at me. He seemed ready to have the confession come to a close. I wondered if he had a Poesy version of penance to dish out to his confessees. Instead of Hail Marys and Our Fathers, perhaps he ordered a plum poem by William Carlos Williams and an Elemental Ode by Neruda.
“There’s something else, Poesy,” Mrs. Cust started up again. “Ben tells me that you were the recipient of a large sum of money from the casino people.”
“Yes, that’s true.”
“And what are you doing in return for that money, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Not at all. Between you and me, Eileen, I’m saying nothing but good things about the casino that will never be built.”
“How can you be sure it won’t be built?”
“You know, and I know, Eileen, that no environmental impact study will ever support a casino with 180 hotel rooms along the river. The roads are insufficient and the septic system can’t support anywhere close to that kind of volume. Furthermore, the community will rally against it, and, you, a very important voice as county commissioner from this district, will surely not support it.”
“So, you’ve taken the money under false pretenses.”
“Well, that’s one way to look at it. I choose to see it as a gift. It makes Ginsberg’s Galley possible, and Red Carpet Casinos has also agreed to build and stock a poetry library in Monte Rio. That building’s due to commence very soon, as a goodwill gesture for the community.”
“That’s very shrewd of you, Poesy.”
“Well,” Sabbatini said, sucking on a hunk of ginger, “I think it’s the community that will benefit in the end.”
Mrs. Cust began sobbing again.
“Tell me what you’re feeling, Eileen. I’m here to offer comfort.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” the woman cried, before blowing her nose, with a bright honking sound, into Sabbatini’s hanky. “It’s just dawning on me that the man is going to die. In many ways, he was an awful man, Poesy, but I loved him. Listen to me, I’m talking about him as if he’s already dead.”
Sabbatini tugged the drawstring tighter on his Sufi pants as he stood, and then he bowed his head. Mrs. Cust rose, without being asked, dropped a hand over her breast, and bowed her head, as if she were pledging holy allegiance. There was no way I was going to stand. I poked a log in the fire and watched the high priest spread out his arms over the penitent in a gesture of benediction. Then he began to recite a section from William Carlos Williams’s “Of Asphodel, That Greeny Flower.”
As he came to the end of his portion, Sabbatini closed his eyes and brought both urgency and an exquisite tenderness into his voice. I have to admit, the effect was spellbinding.
Of asphodel, that greeny flower,
I come my sweet,
to sing to you!
My heart rouses
thinking to bring you news
of something
that concerns you
and concerns many men. Look at
what passes for the new.
You will not find it there but in
despised poems.
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Hear me out
for I too am concerned
and every man
who wants to die at peace in his bed
besides.
I turned away as the tears streamed down Mrs. Cust’s face, not so much in deference to the woman’s modesty but because I was afraid that I, too, might start bawling. The effect of Sabbatini’s delivery was that cathartic. The man himself stood absolutely still, for a moment, like a conductor through whom the last chord of a major symphony was still resonating.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Children, Be Nice Now
“YOU MUST FEEL like you got some revenge,” Quince said, standing at the fireplace. “Keeping me like a hostage in the back room.”
“You could have come out any time,” I said, winking at Sabbatini, who sat cross-legged in front of the fire.
Quince shook her head and her hair fell free from its loose braiding. “No way I was coming out here and listening to that madwoman rant about the casino.”
“Don’t you think she had the right to?”
“Why, because my former bosses paid for her husband’s prostitute?”
“So what’s your history with Mrs. Cust?”
“We have no history.”
“But you slept with her husband?”
“The fuck I did. I wouldn’t sleep with that creep.”
“So why the backroom bit?”
Quince shrugged. “I just had a feeling.”
“A likely story.” I gazed over at Sabbatini, who, staring at the fire, had a beatific expression on his face. I expected him to say something like, children, be nice now, but he said nothing.
“You should have been out here to listen to Father Sabbatini comfort the soon-to-be widowed.”
“I was listening by the open door. Even from a distance it was inspiring. My boss, Dmitri, couldn’t get over Bobby’s preaching.”
“It’s not preaching,” Sabbatini corrected. “It’s poetry.”
“Dmitri came out to do some preliminary work on a possible site and to kick off a feasibility study. He ended up going to both Bobby’s Tuesday- and Wednesday-morning groups. When he got back he told us that getting the poetry priest as an advocate was our first goal. You should know that Dmitri Lermantov is not the kind of man to sit around and read poetry.”
Sabbatini looked up. “After the last year, I’ve come to believe that any man can find poetry.” With that, the poetry priest unfolded himself from his squat and stood up. “I think I need a little rest. I’ll leave you two to your own devices.”
The phrase struck me as funny and it must have hit Quince in a similar way, because as soon as Sabbatini left the room, we both started laughing.
“You’re afraid of my devices, aren’t you?” Quince asked.
“I don’t know what your game is. I don’t know who you are.”
“You keep saying that. Maybe you should take some time to find out.”
“Who has time for such things?”
Quince aimed a hard look at me.
“What are you staring at?”
“A man who’s afraid of his feelings.”
Infiltrator
I grabbed my car keys from Blossom and decided to take a drive to try to clear my head. The last thing I wanted to think about was Quince. I stopped in Cazadero, parking in front of First Christ River of Blood. I wanted to study Mrs. Cust’s REPENT sign in the light of day. What did it mean? Who did she mean it for? All of us sinners? Was it a personal command I should take seriously?
As I sat there musing, a late-model Chevy pulled up beside me and a thin, fortyish man with a minister’s collar climbed out. He wore a gray gabardine suit that looked older than he was. Locking his door with a click, he noticed me in the Neon and gave a little wave. I waved back. Apparently, that wasn’t enough for him. He came over to the driver’s side window and I lowered it.
