Our Lady Fetta and Other Tales

By Theodore Lyons

Our Lady Fetta opens in Portland, Me., and involves a small Hollywood estate with too many beneficiaries. The disposition of the will naturally carries the protagonist back to the Midwest and ultimately to the Southwest to reconnect with his former college classmates, one of whom acts as his attorney. The novels diverse settings include Halifax, Chicago, Mesa, Santa Feoand Tucson, where a couple of transplanted Mainers also figure among the heros allies. Sanctimony, greed, religiosity, acculturation, the preservation of natural habitats, and other topics are explored; in addition to commentary and ideas by Robert Louis Stevenson, Somerset Maugham, Carlos Castaneda, Jim Morrison, Bram Stoker, and William Peter Blatty.
Jet-setters, one of the short stories featured in the book, centers on a hilarious two-year romp in the Samoan islands at the onset of the global AIDS crisis. Other notable tales include New America, in which the author proposes a simple but macabre solution to overcrowded, tax-draining prisons,nnamely, banishment aboard galleons; Cardinal du Jour, about a teenage boy who narrowly escapes being molested by a high-ranking priest; Louse Party, about an LSD party and the horrors of addiction and drug abuse; and House with Ghost, based on actual events, about a man suffering from spirit attachment, whose ghostly companion haunts the home in which he rents a room and drives him out of the house.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Feb 3, 2005
• ISBN: 9781469108872

Theodore Lyons

Theodore Lyons majored in English at Illinois Wesleyan University and edited for several journals. His other books include 91 Gordon Street and Two Occult Tales.

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Our Lady Fetta and Other Tales

Theodore Lyons

Copyright © 2007 by Theodore Lyons.

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Contents

PART 1

Our Lady Fetta

PART 2

New America

Jet-setters

Father Angleman

A Primitive State of Marriage

Two Cambridge Men

Uncle Vic

Cardinal du Jour

Mimi Stitch

Delaney

Louse Party

White Sox Park

Our Man, Muttly

Larry Sandcastle

The Ming Years

The Troublemaker

Indian Creek

House with Ghost

PART 1

Our Lady Fetta

When Ted received the news that the page proofs of his two books would be stalled in Québec by three weeks, he had just finished Maugham’s 1908 novel The Magician, about the sorcerer Aleister Crowley. This delay disappointed him because he had been unproductive for a month, apart from reading, cleaning his car, and packing to move back to Chicago. On the other hand, he had wanted time to read (and reread) some old stories in the nice spring weather in Deering Oaks park, and this he did by the hour everyday with a pack of cigarettes. He had piled up some choice tales by Robert Louis Stevenson and many others by Somerset Maugham, such as Rain (set in Pago Pago), and The Narrow Corner, which he had read 13 years earlier in Apia. He had much in common with these gents, the least of which was that they were all writers: like them, he had lived in Apia, in the Samoan Islands; and had contracted tuberculosis, which had wiped out Stevenson at the age of 44. Ted read that Maugham, to convalesce, had been bed ridden for two years in a sanitorium in northern Scotland. Maugham was 20 when Stevenson died in 1894 near Apia, for which he had set sail in 1889 to prolong his life, ravaged by irreversible lung infection; when Maugham died in 1965, Ted was 5. They had shared Ted’s fondness for speaking French and Samoan, two important South Pacific languages. Like Stevenson, Ted had given up the legal profession and had a girlfriend with kids from a previous marriage. Similarly, Ted admired Maugham, a penniless physician while writing The Magician, for choosing not to practice medicine. He wished to follow Maugham’s bizarre career path but with a minor deviation. He had edited dental journals for about eight years, and his knowledge of dentistry, he fairly judged, was equivalent to that of a third-year dental student. He saw no reason, except money, why he shouldn’t enroll in graduate school, which couldn’t but improve his writing, and then travel part time and pursue a career in letters. He concentrated on coming in to a windfall to pay for a doctorate.

On the price estimate for his first novel, he altered the print run slightly. He signed both estimates, walked to the post office on Forest Avenue, and mailed them back to eastern Canada after a postal clerk metered the correct international postage. Ted adamantly refused to guess at postage, particularly with regard to urgent correspondence, so he always took time to go to a post office and if necessary wait in line.

Monday, June 1st, was unseasonably warm in Portland, Me. He had woken with a gradually intensifying headache; by midafternoon, as he sat in Glickman Library, the rare aura, as it is termed medically, disturbed his peripheral vision and warned of severe cerebral and muscular pain, and unstable weather. Half able to see, for the dancing sunbeams gaily bewitched his vision, he tripped home unsteadily on an earthen path through the meticulously cut grass and around the lagoon in Deering Oaks. He was soon immobilized in bed, or in the shower—hydrotherapy provided a momentary respite from the lancinating throb. Unable to sleep, he was in the shower at 2 a.m. when the night’s first yawn shuddered through his torso and teased him with the familiar promise of a few hours of slumber.

Overnight, the temperature dropped 40°; consequently, the left side of his neck, where the pain had been most acute, was inflamed at 5 a.m. with a cramp so stiff that he couldn’t turn his head without wincing. His migraine had subsided, however, so he rested for an hour, shivering under a blanket. At 6 a.m., he stretched like a housedog, then persevered through his calisthenics routine to give himself a fighting chance that day. His pain and fatigue prevented him from doing much other than sauntering to the park to read and watch the ducks. Huddling beneath his sweatshirt, for his clothes hung from him like rags on a skeleton, he felt upset, staring at the threatening gray sky, which would burst soon. Had he been foolish not to get a job during the previous nine months while he finished writing and editing another book? Remonstrance split his heart. Anxious about losing ground, he squirmed under the anguish of career adjustment; only seven copies of his first book had been sold since being printed 18 months earlier, a wildcat venture perhaps. His liquid holdings had slipped from $38,000 to $28,000, and feeling like a king in rags, he tried to determine how to offset costs further (including sizable printing invoices) over the coming months. Like a painter, he had subordinated life to art, and he had suffered a mild heart attack for it. He seemed to possess, like the French painter Gauguin, a spirit in his soul that could rend him from head to toe. Does artistry liberate the soul from or bind it to pain? On the other hand, his mind hadn’t lain fallow, and his tax-free retirement account, safely invested in mutual funds, was accruing $65 monthly; this was solacing, given that half of all Americans have no such account, according to a national news report, and the other half are smacked with sporadic losses in volatile markets. If he had been gainfully employed, he would’ve spent money on what he had learned to live without—barbers, doctors, medications, fine dining, and new books. Necessity, for heaven’s sake, had taught him to crop his hair—a skill that he had wanted to develop anyway. Now he needn’t trouble himself to find, wait for, or tip a hairdresser. If he erred with the scissors, well, his hair would grow back in due course and hide the mistake. He calculated that his meager income of $500 since early September—from several sources, e.g., interest from savings—equaled what he would’ve garnered from part-time or temporary employment in the six weeks since he had dropped off his manuscripts and artwork in Québec in late April. He questioned the advice of a confidante (a psychic medium) who had encouraged him to put his writing career and travel plans ahead of all else, and he decided to seek more counsel about this matter and various others.

The charley horse in his neck, an unusual Canadian cold front sweeping New England, and his African neighbors’ noisy stereo and stinky cooking combined to deprive Ted of sleep. His compromised natural defenses depressed him, and this acidified his attitude. An obstreperous young white woman had a child by one of them. Completely deficient in African culture and therefore unaware that African men rarely marry, she apparently had deceived herself into thinking that she could wangle a marriage proposal out of the father of her child. After years of carting the child to her boyfriend’s house, she had become distraught upon realizing that the child’s father would never marry her and had stuck her defection from chastity in her ear. Her awakening had precipitated towering rage; hence, late into the night, pallid with passion, she routinely fought with the child’s father, and one afternoon, the irascible woman had shattered the front door window by slamming it. The more tactless she became, with her flat, gray eyes flashing like stainless steel, the more her African paramour recoiled, and this compounded her venom. The snake charmer had taken on a new roommate, rich and idle, whom he appeared to be grooming to follow his hell-bent footfalls. This sordid extra judicial promiscuity seemed crooked to Ted, the more so because this was the United States, although he had lived in Africa. Shouldn’t a couple determine beforehand to marry or not in the event of pregnancy, instead of hoaxing each other and later destroying property and their relationships with their in-laws? The whole fatuous bunch of them sadly digressed from the children of New England mill hands, and Ted doubted that the exodus from our nation’s cornfields had been all that beneficial.

He couldn’t explain why, but he was still extraordinarily angry. Whenever he had this sort of not-so-superstitious prevision, accompanied by a conniption (paroxysm?), he knew that something bordering his life was left of center; shortly, he understood what it was. On June 4th, as he finished reading Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, he happened to receive another letter from Miya, the second one that week—surely this was a red flag portending something twitchy. He had disconnected his telephone in May, so they had no choice but to correspond until she arrived. Upstairs in bed, where he continued to nurse his swollen neck, he peeled open the envelope from Miya: two letters fell out—one from her, in which she explained the other, from his sister Elsa. According to Elsa, his great-aunt Zelda in Hollywood had died of stomach cancer on May 21st, her 86th birthday, and her fat, loudmouthed niece Fetta had been named executor of Zelda’s estate. Ted flushed purple, and a sudden chill rushed to his throat. The shocking news set his teeth and stole his breath like falling into cold water. How could Zelda have been so remiss, unless doped on morphine, as to put a New World vulture like Fetta, clawing to feather her own nest, in charge of an estate in southern California? Two weeks earlier, he had dreamed of Fetta, with a voracious appetite, celebrating with 15 house guests and a caldron of cold cuts (a year’s supply), and Fetta had been trying to contact a television station to film the gala ballyhoo. Ted had remembered from his Swiss tarot deck that the card marked Le Diable (French for the devil) is key 15—signifying chaos, overindulgence, insomnia, inebriation, and materialism. Elsa also had corresponded to inform Ted that he had been named in Zelda’s will and that Fetta—tongue in cheek, no doubt—had a few questions for him. Questions? This gave him goose flesh, and his indignation mounted. Was this another of Fetta’s discreditable ruses to delay and obstruct disbursement of Ted’s legacy, or abscond with it? Or to buffalo Ted into contacting her so she could rebuke or provoke him, or propound an excuse to cheat him in the event that he ignored her? In the past, he had blithely overlooked her most transparent lies. She can frizzle in hell, he thought. Fetta had already made off with his inheritance from his grandpa Jess, who had died 10 months earlier. Ted hadn’t troubled to retain a pricey lawyer, no less above the law than Fetta, to recover the inheritance from Jess, which by now Fetta surely had squandered. No one—least of all her doting, henpecked husband—was the wiser in the dry inland towns, hummocks, and bean fields of central Illinois, where vilifying Fetta burrowed, out of the ken of police. Could a lawman truly upend her? In her own mind being beyond reproach, she would steamroll and bulldoze a podgy, wrinkled-suited solicitor, unaccustomed to and thus quailing at Fetta’s low growl and greasy, uproarious blather. Clambering with ungovernable desire for money, family relations like bloodless Fetta stoop to the depths of infamy while fleeing from her barefaced treachery to a twilight religious service.

Noting that she had toyed with calling Fetta for him, Miya wisely had thought better of it, given what Ted had related about Fetta’s unrestrained duplicity, subterfuge, and chicanery. He fumed silently, then exploded, and yelled for hours at his crucifix, like Bram Stoker’s Dracula, about how the church is led by dark angels like acrimonious Fetta. What could he have done differently about the deaths of Jess and Zelda? They had been buried by the time Ted had learned of them. More often than not, Ted declined to pay homage to convention; but having missed their funerals, he reasoned that he undoubtedly had laid egotistic Fetta open to public embarrassment, and private censure in the family, and that she subsequently was avenging her spotless outward piety by stealing Ted’s inheritances, like a surreptitious Cain rooting Abel’s carrots at sundown. Ted unwittingly had perfected a knack for excoriating others’ raw spots; deceitful, hypocritical Fetta, exacting to a fault like a pedant and cramming her mouth with food purchased with anyone’s money, would stop at nothing—neither theft nor other crimes—to slake her thirst for slander and revenge.

Less than two years earlier, when Ted had relocated to Boston, Jess and Zelda had been alive and in decent health. Had Ted’s disappearance, weighing heavily on the minds of these two wholesome Roman Catholics, contributed to their physical erosion and hastened their demise? Both had succumbed to cancer. Ted’s mother (Jess’ oldest daughter) also had died of it.

Miya confirmed in her second letter that she would arrive by bus the following weekend, so he scheduled an appointment for Monday, June 15th, with his psychic advisor, who agreed to come for nothing to Ted’s apartment. The heavens broke eight days later, and for 72 hours, a deluge of rain, the likes of which Mainers had never seen, washed out the state’s roads, bridges, and farmlands until Miya’s bus rumbled into Portland on Sunday afternoon, June 14th. Presaged by his head and neck discomfort, the rain lashed so forcefully against the house that Ted had to shut the storm windows. The mercury couldn’t quite edge above 59°—the daytime high.

Did you receive one of the proofs? he asked hopelessly as they walked up the sharp ascent from the bus station to his humid loft.

No, she answered. I haven’t heard a thing. She had gotten her hair cut short, which looked as pretty as he had imagined when he had advised her to cut it off.

You’ll see: when you call home next week, the happy proofs’ll be sitting on your bed like messy puppies. They’ll probably arrive tomorrow. Miya had waited in Chicago as long as possible to intercept them, but she finally had to use her bus ticket or lose the discount fare of $59 to Portland.

It would be nice if you could retain Edward, the psychic suggested to Ted the next afternoon. He would be a loyal advisor. Legal action would terrify Fetta.

Would Eddy fight her for me? Ted asked.

He might.

Reminiscences about his college buddy Eddy pricked Ted’s conscience. Graduating in five years with a grade point average of 2.6 and a bachelor’s in tax accounting, Eddy nonetheless had just finished night law school at the top of his class, albeit crippled by rheumatoid arthritis; $70,000 in school loans dangling overhead like a log tied to a string; a wife, an ex-wife, and three children by them; and his ’72 Chevy pickup, with no tires, on blocks in a parking lot in Lombard, Ill. These obstructions notwithstanding, it is still common for a man to rise nearly from the status of DOA to the lofty pinnacle of JD in 15 short years, but Eddy’s legs had gone to pieces in Chicago’s miserable humidity. The quantity of booze that he and Eddy had consumed in college would’ve destroyed most students—a tribute to Ted’s and Eddy’s stamina and longevity; what with their dissolute history, Eddy had been lucky to escape with arthritis, and Ted with migraines. In late July 1983, a year after they had finished college, he and Eddy, merrily drunk, had been bobbing at 2 a.m. in Lake Michigan, like two capsized oarsmen, under an uneasy full moon and a cloudless sky; Rogers Park beach, of course, had been closed. In retrospection, Ted agreed with Miya that the episode seemed funny only because he and Eddy hadn’t drowned. Sobriety in those days had been as unwelcome to them as frost to Floridians. In his mind’s eye, Ted could still see that yellow moon and the black cockroaches swarming Eddy’s infested dive with his first wife, and first son, born four months after they had married. In addition to his new son and his (unemployed) wife, Eddy for some weeks also had supported her father (Jack Sprat, Eddy had named him), a 60-year-old unemployed actor, and Jack’s nice (but abjectly desperate) 35-year-old second wife, likewise unemployed that summer of 1983. Eddy had been working then as a buyer for an auto parts warehouse for a salary of $14,000—hardly more than Ted and his wife had set aside in the third world. Eddy had been at fisticuffs with Sprat, whose second wife had deserted him during this darkly comic tribulation. Ted remembered when Eddy’s attorney (for a fee of $15,000), through expert maneuvering in 1993, had erased Eddy’s $40,000 in back alimony for his elusive ex-wife, whose slick but inept lawyer had bitched the legal proceedings to settle Eddy’s divorce in Chicago. Applauding the bargain, Eddy had praised his attorney for being a shark; this single coup de grâce in court, Ted guessed, had been Eddy’s inspiration to enter the profession of law. Ted by comparison had invested (without borrowing) $17,000 in his publishing business, and untold thousands in labor, although the toll exacted physically and psychologically was inestimable, to say nothing of the fact that his business was awash in negative equity. In 1992, Ted had written but two pages when he had first visited Québec City, the last North American bastion of pure French culture; upon returning that spring of 1998 to this elevated mystical city founded in 1608, he had dropped off two book-length manuscripts (totaling 800 pages) and four cover photos, which he and Miya had shot in two cities.

Eddy had met Fetta when Ted was in college. Unannounced, she and her befuddled husband once had brought a case of beer and pounds each of smoked sausage, cheese, and crackers to Ted’s dorm room one Saturday afternoon while he and Eddy and Eddy’s girlfriend had been listening to LA Woman by The doors instead of attending their university’s last home basketball game. Stunned by this unexpected arrival of good fortune, which seemed to have achieved fleshy Fetta’s ulterior motives, Eddy and his girlfriend had proceeded to drink and eat the livelong day, and they and Ted had been tight as snare drums by midnight. Ted had become inured to Fetta’s crashing visits and her prodigal gifts (purchased by her husband or Jess because Fetta wouldn’t work); sometimes, Ted and his friends had been stoned immaculate (to borrow Jim Morrison’s phrase) when Fetta, Jess, and her dutiful spouse had materialized in the hallway outside his dorm room. Ted came to suspect that she had tried to show up his family members, impress his friends, and buy his love and loyalty. To naive Ted and Elsa, nobbling Fetta had bestowed capacious shopping sacks glittering with costly gifts in front of their half sister and half brother, to whom Fetta would then hand something like a marshmallow Santa Claus or a plastic egg containing a piece of candy. Their stepmother Salamay (Fetta’s bull’s-eye) had generally been affronted, enraged, and victimized by popish Fetta’s bribery, brazen archness, and base parlor tricks. Ted and Elsa couldn’t visit Fetta without dragging away three or four extra large bags bristling with everything from hand-me-downs and rummage sale items to odd, discounted merchandise and canned food; he had never been so relieved to leave anyone in his dust as when he had finally fled from snarling Fetta, who for almost 40 years had paraded shamelessly under the guise of his godmother.

Tell me about Zelda, Ted said.

She felt terrible about you. When you disappeared two years ago, she regretted not encouraging you more to relocate to southern California, said the medium, who used several chic names to protect her identity; lately, she had begun using the stately name Diana—maybe because of its popularity in the wake of Princess Diana’s fatal accident.

If Zelda had helped me settle in Los Angeles, I couldn’t have created this rift in my mother’s family, Ted said.

Exactly, Diana responded. In 1996, a psychic had exhorted Ted to stay in touch with Elsa because Zelda was going to die and leave him a bundle, so he had provided Elsa with addresses long after he had terminated his communication with his other family members.

Zelda knew about the nonsense during your childhood, the medium continued.

Negligence, accidental deaths, alcoholism, domestic violence, mental abuse, drug abuse, impoverishment, and a family split six ways from Sunday, Ted enumerated calmly. Why in God’s name did Zelda appoint Fetta executor?

Glancing sidelong into the perimeter, the psychic paused infinitesimally, then at the crest of a deep breath uttered, Pressure.

Ah, yes, said Ted. A knowing smile narrowed his mouth. Fetta’s effective pressure-cooker tactics. I should’ve known. Ted remembered how Fetta had tried for 10 years (unsuccessfully) to push Zelda to leave Hollywood and convince everyone that Zelda was mentally incompetent.

Fetta had made up and disseminated numerous stories about Zelda not knowing where or with whom she was, and how Zelda had once seen Fetta’s double, while shopping with Fetta, as if there were a sidewalk sufficiently wide to accommodate two Fettas walking together. Ted hadn’t believed Fetta’s lies about Zelda, and no doctor could ever substantiate them, upon examining Zelda—much as Fetta connived and persevered to have rich, old Zelda declared a crackbrain in need of a conservator. Ted realized that Fetta had long been after Zelda’s estate.

Fetta is furious because Zelda intended to leave more money to you than to her, Diana revealed bizarrely. Because Fetta is in charge, the disposition of Zelda’s estate is all screwed up. Expect trouble later this year at Miya’s house.

Ted chuckled at this, the last of Zelda’s outlandish stunts to outwit and exasperate her blubbery, jealous, sanctimonious niece, Fetta, who, as if to trick everyone, never missed evening mass and sang the loudest; afterward, she always ducked into a tavern for a tankard of frothy beer and a fatty sandwich. Fetta is a swindling scandalmonger, and by trying to defraud me and the other heirs, she’s got herself in a pretty trou-de-loup. Did Zelda earmark the same sum of money to me and Elsa?

Yes, the seer answered. You have placed Fetta in an awkward position.

Right now, Elsa is the only person who can contact me, Ted observed. If Elsa receives more than me, and Fetta has to release any of my inheritance to Elsa, she’ll know immediately that Fetta is bilking me. To appear equitable, Fetta may be forced to steal the same sum from Elsa as from me. Isn’t it best to ignore Fetta’s schemes to impede my inheritance? Ted wasn’t about to ensnare himself in Fetta’s gluepot of sticky entanglements.

Ouais, replied the peculiar visitor, who intermittently broke into French. Elsa has had it with Fetta. You have had a breakthrough today, Diana changed the subject. You have sacrificed much to lay out God’s worst followers. You’ll be the death of people. Try the church, the eccentric mystic translated. Listening attentively as if his guest were invisible, Ted stared vacantly and sipped his black tea. In these treasured secret sessions, which in his view weren’t unscientific balderdash, his life’s greatest quandaries were threshed out. At times, deciphering Diana’s oracular discourse was like reading a manuscript with missing pages or picking up a hardboiled egg with your thumbs. He reflected upon his out-of-body dream that morning of standing in a dim church: with a sweeping gesture of his hand, and without touching them, he had drawn half a dozen lights, dangling from long chains, back and forth, riotously up and down, swinging this way and that, as though propelled by a gust; the dull lights doubled as gargantuan chimes, clanging dully as if to beckon parishioners to a dumb show of funeral services; then suddenly, he had been floating in the dark outside rectangular, stained-glass windows along buttresses. Which church had it been? His first thought upon waking was of attending mass in the fall of 1983 at his wife’s hometown parish west of Chicago while they had been waiting to go to Samoa. Did the dream mean that he should stay at Miya’s house in south Chicago and postpone moving her to Mesa? The tarot five of coins also had leapt to mind: this card is represented by two beggars—one lame, the other blind and bandaged—hobbling at dusk near a church. Earlier that year, Ted had dreamed of his headmaster Kaleve at the secondary school where Ted and his wife had taught in Samoa in 1984. Kaleve’s first-rate English, his education degree from the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, and his brilliant teaching career had gotten him admitted in 1985 to the seminary in Apia at the age of 36. In Ted’s dream, Kaleve had asked him, What will you do with your life? Will you start a charitable church? He treated his interpretations delicately, like pieces of fine art. He had graduated from a Methodist university, where he had taken three semesters of religion. Maugham originally had studied for the ministry.

Will I receive anything from Zelda’s estate?

Take what you can get, Diana retorted.

I can only hope for partial success, what with Fetta hogging everything. Why would she give me anything?

To save face, the clairvoyant riposted.

That’s sensible, Ted reckoned. Elsa and her children soon will be all that remains of Fetta’s family. Fetta had been too selfish to adopt children, care for anyone else’s, or give up her private life of shopping six hours a day, dining out, and going to football games. Ted once had obtained a business opportunity for Fetta with which to fill in her daily inactive hours, but she had snubbed him by fibbing that her husband didn’t want her to work, although she had complained that her friends with two incomes could afford vacations in Florida. By commandeering Ted’s and Elsa’s legacies, Fetta could finance that annual break from her monotonous, do-nothing existence. Fetta represented everything repugnant to the flesh and bone of intelligent society.

You are easy to steal from, Diana elucidated.

Jesus said something like, ‘If you catch a thief making off with your cloak, offer your tunic as well.’

Naturally— Diana said, to help clothe the needy pig, one of God’s own, and to bury the ignorant swine under more karmic debt, out from which most beasts like Fetta can never hope to dig, even if they had another hundred lives in which to propitiate God and atone for their sacrileges, perpetrated before and after evening mass. By not fighting a wily pillager like Fetta, which amounts to abetting her, you unwittingly contribute to her spiritual perdition—commensurate with the value of your inheritance, which is substantial in this case. Weigh, for example, the sheer legal consequences of being caught stealing a sum so great. In court, the greater the heist, the more grievous the penalty. You could land Fetta behind bars for grand larceny.

I understand how spiritual retribution works, said Ted, as if he had just parsed a bad sentence. I won’t lift a finger to stop Fetta or avenge myself—that way, she’ll suffer more.

Fetta is fixing to take you to market, Diana relayed.

On the contrary, Fetta is the piggy impaled on the flaming spit, Ted quipped to parry the medium’s flair for metaphor. It would be nothing to a weaker victim of Fetta’s egotistic spite to drive to her burg of shopping malls and blow up her car. For $200 and an address, Eddy’s Rogers Park landlord, with Mafia connections, had once offered to make a telephone call and have a man’s shins smashed for screwing around with Ted’s estranged wife.

Elsa sees what you were hinting at in your letter to her last fall, Diana said. She’ll be surprised to learn of your strong spiritual connection to Zelda.

It was only a matter of time, Ted answered. To forewarn Elsa, he had reminded her that for years Fetta had harried her, as a child, to get her hands on her and Ted’s dead mother’s money.

You encouraged me to stay in Portland through June and predicted that I would have a new writing project of ‘considerable length’, Ted recapped. What you foretold is coming to pass. A lot of material has developed for me recently.

Write— Diana encouraged him, and bear in mind that art cannot be restricted to human logic.

You needn’t struggle anymore nor worry about money. Even as we speak, your prospects are brightening. Your financial and business outlooks are better than you realize. You will succeed at everything. Nothing can stop you now. Your second novel will be a big moneymaker. I dare say you will be a notorious outcast. Miya, read Poe and Plath.

I read a few of Poe’s stories from one of Ted’s books.

"We’ll find a paperback of Plath’s novel, The Bell Jar," Ted added. While researching material in the Portland Public Library, he had discovered that Poe had been born in Boston, the setting for most of Ted’s second novel.

Miya finally chipped in with a question: What if I’m asked to make Ted claim authorship of his books?

Pray to God that no one asks, the sensitive counseled. Pursue a doctorate.

Why? Ted asked.

To increase your influence, piped the medium.

If I were a doctor, I wouldn’t practice medicine, he debated.

Just so. You’ll be like Somerset Maugham, Diana foresaw, deciphering the alphabet soup, invisible to everyone but her, which floated just above the corner of her right eye. By age 30, having just finished medical school, Maugham had written four unpublished plays and a couple of novels, and he was stone broke; almost overnight, his dramas simultaneously crashed the London stage and launched his international career, spanning half a century during his lifetime. Leave here the last day of June. I’ll visit you this summer and possibly again before you leave Chicago. Miya, it’s better not to move to Mesa this year.

If I don’t leave Chicago, I’ll be sacrificing my goals, said Miya, who still had doubts about when to relocate out west.

Your spiritual goals, the psychic specified.

Two days later, while Miya continued reading her biography of E. B. White (who had adopted Maine as his home state), Ted sat before a tablet on his kitchen table and began a letter to Elsa, with whom he hadn’t corresponded in five months. He thanked her for informing him about Zelda’s death, and he recounted the highlights of his relationship with Zelda, the childless matriarch of his mother’s defunct family…

I last saw Zelda on her birthday in 1991 at grandpa Jess’ house [in central Ill.], and I last talked to her at Christmas 1992 on the telephone at your house in Sundance [Wyo.]. I last visited her in Hollywood [Calif.] at Christmas 1988 when I had gone to determine whether to move to Los Angeles. You’ll recall that I had wanted to leave Chicago then. Surprisingly, Zelda wasn’t overly encouraging, so I made a new plan and ultimately went to Africa, instead of moving with you to Wyo. Zelda and I had much in common: we both divorced young and never remarried; we both went to Africa and Europe; and we drove 20-year-old cars and lived alone in two-flats in two of our biggest cities. Isn’t it odd that Zelda remembered me (and probably you) in a legacy, but grandpa Jess didn’t? Could you answer Fetta’s questions for me or find out what she wants to know. I don’t intend to call her. I’d be grateful for anything you could recover for me (from Zelda); I haven’t had a paycheck in 10 months.

Ted was toying with Elsa to enlist her to till the soil and plant a seed that would germinate into a Venus’ flytrap in which to suffocate duplicitous Fetta in her intolerable religiosity. Ted reflected that charitable, beloved Zelda would’ve bequeathed sums to numerous relatives from both sides of her family, including nieces and nephews, and great-nieces and -nephews, such as Ted and Elsa. Decrepit old Jess, on the other hand, had left no family, apart from his daughter Fetta and his two grandchildren, Ted and Elsa. According to Fetta, however, Jess had willed naught but a box of junk memorabilia each to Ted and Elsa. As for Jess’ money and property—again, according to stout Fetta—not so much as a dull nickel had been bequeathed to Jess’ only two grandchildren, whom the cancer-riddled 89-year-old man had loved more than anything, except his cigars, wild mushroom soup, and vermouth highballs. Whenever Ted had visited, Jess had slipped him some gas money but always with the admonition not to tell Fetta. Unlike her, neither Jess nor Zelda (Jess’ sister-in-law) was a hateful, vindictive creature who would’ve held Ted in low esteem for not staying in touch nor visiting them during their illnesses; so proud they were of Ted for shouldering the white man’s burden to the third world and waging war on ignorance, racism, and decimating tropical diseases; and living and working in Chicago, giving to the homeless, stamping out segregation, painting over graffiti, and tripping up blue- and white-collar criminals. Despite her loud, indefatigable, out-of-key hymnal singing in her Caucasian church every evening before happy hour, Fetta was incensed to learn that Ted was up there supporting the devil’s street urchins in Chicago’s minority neighborhoods. Merely to hear Zelda’s response, Ted once had remarked to Zelda that he would marry a black in Africa, and Zelda unexpectedly had retorted that a shoeless African wife would be disgraceful. Eddy’s second wife was black American, and he had replied supportively that marrying an African who didn’t speak English nor drive would be the next logical step in an illustrious, checkered career such as Ted’s. Even Eddy’s brother David had married a black from Ghana. Good old Eddy—he understood Ted, whom he had known half his life. Keep her pregnant and tethered to the bedroom, Eddy had advised. Eddy and his second wife had typically been blind drunk, often in their underwear and cradling a half empty bottle of bourbon between them, whenever her parents had dropped by impromptu of a Sunday morning in Oak Park.

When Ted finished writing to Elsa, he posted his letter; he wanted it to have a Portland postmark, leading her to believe that he was spending the summer in Maine before moving to Arizona or going abroad. He didn’t want his Illinois relatives (namely Fetta) turning up to harangue him at Miya’s house, although they rarely had visited him when he had lived in Chicago. With respect to his plans, he had been deliberately vague in his letter, which would reach Elsa by Father’s Day.

Ted recounted to Miya Zelda’s history and traumatic early adulthood. The night before young Zelda married in Danville, Ill., the gruesome groomsmen had thrown a raucous bachelor’s party for Zelda’s betrothed—a hapless, loose-living wino, who contracted syphilis from a hooker during the unholy prenuptial festivities. God only knows how many women may have bedded down with Zelda’s fiancé that dreary night back in 1937 in a dim room near the kegs of Blatz beer. Within a couple of years, Zelda and her husband found out too late that he was crawling with venereal disease. Miraculously, her blood tests showed that she hadn’t been infected. After she scraped the bottom of the pea barrel and got to the rotten heart of the matter, she divorced the louse, bought a bus ticket to Hollywood, Calif., and rode out there with a friend to lease an apartment. Along the way, as the story goes, a fellow passenger gave Zelda a job lead at Technicolor, and she and her friend were hired shortly after arriving. For years, Zelda lived with the threat that latent VD would surface in her blood tests, which was possible, according to medical opinion at the time; from what Ted understood, the stress of that fairly overwhelmed her. She continued to work at Technicolor while residing in a second floor flat in an old actor’s home on Taft Avenue. Eventually, the homeowner put the house up for sale, but Zelda had stowed enough money to buy it—in an era when it was still possible to buy a home for $30,000 in southern California. Zelda moved downstairs, which had two heated bedrooms; a nice fireplace; and a sunny tea room off the kitchen, with a view of a verdant, fruit-bearing avocado tree growing tall in the back yard. Some Decembers in Hollywood, like when Ted was there in ’88, are just as cold as in Chicago; the orange crop had been ruined that winter, he recalled. During this second of Ted’s visits to Zelda, the bouncer-sacristan had booted an obnoxious, delusional panhandler who had entered the church in which Zelda and Ted had been attending mass; other aggressive beggars, in exchange for a $5 tip, had taken groceries, then the gas pump, out of Ted’s hands while he and Zelda had been shopping. Hollywood, like most major urban centers, had become tainted by money. Using her edgy reticule bursting with coins, house keys, and heavy jewelry, Zelda had jumped at occasions to beat back Hollywood’s tramps and condemn their lust for booze and drugs, because of which they couldn’t wheedle a penny out of her. She had fantasized since childhood about living there and quickly owned that she refused to let them blight her visions of grandeur. Ted doubted that Zelda’s dream house had been covered with the decorative black-painted steel bars to which she was forced to resort to protect herself in her old age, in the face of rising crime in the world’s film capital.

Zelda rented out her upstairs flat, her wealth accrued like whip cream on a pumpkin pie, and she was as gay and ravishing as the most beneficent of Hollywood’s stars. Zelda’s pay and influence multiplied at Technicolor, and before long, she attracted a variety of eligible suitors, any of whom would’ve been a trophy and a handsome catch for a girl from a little fishing town in southern Illinois. A couple of them, in fact, proposed to her. Being an exemplary Roman Catholic, however, Zelda couldn’t remarry in the church without getting her first marriage annulled. Despite her persistent effort over the years to obtain an annulment, the church consistently rebuffed her and made her choose between her faith and her bed. At least once every lifetime, everyone faces a critical karmic challenge, which can escort the soul along the path to heaven’s salvation or hell’s dark dissolution. Of course, now annulments and dispensations are handed out like coupons. To her moral credit, Zelda opted to remain celibate, in the noblest sense of the word, since in her day, good girls and good Catholics didn’t have premarital sex. Zelda scored even more heavenly touchdowns by supporting her ex-husband in Danville, Ill., who, as the long years passed, could do no more than push a broom part time in a factory, ravaged as he was by VD. All but a mentally incompetent vegetable—his syphilitic brain, eyes, hands, feet, and internal organs twisted and half rotted—her wasted ex-husband staggered to a hole in the ground, a pathetic testimony to destructive sex and, conversely, the life-preserving power of condoms, marketing for which would envelop our nation’s manhood in the coming decades.

After the flush of youth had reluctantly released its grasp from Zelda, she donned a jet-black wig, which, peculiarly, always appeared smart and even fooled a few people for many years, including Ted, but she blossomed in her later years. By then, her semiannual blood tests (spanning 20 years) had verified that the harrowing threat of VD at long last had receded. Her great faith had spared her from premature physical disintegration, so bewigged Zelda literally gave her life to the church: every year, she visited the Holy Land and Middle East to retrace our Lord’s footsteps and ride llamas; every morning, she attended 6 a.m. mass in Beverly Hills at the chapel of an obscure cloister, where the softly singing vestal