Creatures of Want and Ruin

by Molly Tanzer

  The night was warm, but the hot water felt good as the jasmine-scented breeze plucked at her bare shoulders through the open window, chilling the nape of her neck. She finished her cigarette and listened to the sounds of raucous laughter and snippets of conversation. Someone had brought a banjolele and was strumming some popular ditty.

  The longer Fin reflected, the stupider she felt for having gotten so upset. So they’d had a party without her. Was it really that big a deal? And even if it was, snarling at Jimmy in the middle of it wasn’t mature or reasonable. She’d made herself ridiculous, and worse than that, she’d seen the look on Bobbie’s face as she’d left the room—superior, calculating, and aloof.

  She’d pay for storming off. Bobbie always objected to what she called dramatic gestures; Fin would have to walk on eggshells around her for a while, as her friend wasn’t one for apologies; she never had been, even as a girl at school. One had to demonstrate one’s remorse to her, through deed as well as word.

  The water had become too cool, so Fin got out and dried off. By then, there were fewer voices outside, but they were louder, grosser. She heard Duke’s belly laugh and Edgar’s snide snicker as she wrapped herself in a fluffy towel, happier to be upstairs and alone than down there with her friends and husband.

  She’d thought to do a bit of reading before turning off the light, but her eyes would not stay open. Nor would her mind settle, so she half listened in the dark as the party finally broke up.

  She was just drifting off when a knock at her door woke her.

  “Come in,” she said, turning on the light and sitting up.

  It was Jimmy. He looked sauced as he slouched against the doorjamb.

  He’d come to bed. Fin wasn’t sure why that surprised her. She hadn’t gotten the impression that he and Bobbie had been introducing themselves as a couple—rather, it had seemed they’d forgotten her existence entirely.

  “Still up?” he asked, slurring a bit.

  “Up enough.”

  “Hey, kid, about earlier . . . I never meant to offend you. Really.”

  “Would you like to come in?” She felt ridiculous inviting her husband into their bedroom, but she felt more ridiculous talking to him as he lounged in the doorway.

  “That’s a swell idea.”

  Jimmy was in a good mood—so good that he comically looked up and down the hallway and then loosened his tie as he shut the door behind him.

  Fin quickly assessed whether she was in any mood for some hanky-panky; she was. If they were both going to be awake in the same room, they might as well enjoy it.

  “Jimmy?”

  It was Bobbie, outside the door.

  “Hey Jimmy-Jims, you in there?” Edgar was, too. “We need you.”

  Fin had her suspicions about Edgar and Bobbie—they spent an awful lot of time pretending not to notice one another while always somehow being within another’s orbit—but she was baffled why they would be after Jimmy to join them, and after everyone had left or gone to bed.

  “Hold on just a sec,” said Jimmy, and answered the door.

  “There you are. We need you. There’s a problem—a mistake,” said Edgar, nodding at Fin as she pulled the bedsheet up to cover herself. “There’s some big old armoire in my bedroom blocking everything. I got Bobbie here to help, but she and I can’t shift it—and I can’t get past it to get into bed. I hate to ask, but will you help us?”

  Jimmy turned to Fin. “I won’t be long,” he said.

  Fin waited on him for a bit, and then a bit more, before turning in for good.

  He made it to bed, though she knew not when; he was there beside her when she woke early in the pale light of first dawn. She’d been dreaming of the water—not the calm water of the Great South Bay, either; an angry sea, with fierce swells and wind that whipped her hair about her face. She’d been on a boat, clinging to the gunwale, but it had been what lay beneath the churning surface that frightened her most.

  She turned to where Jimmy slept beside her, but pulled back her hand before touching his shoulder for comfort.

  4

  The members of Amityville’s summer elite could not seem to get it through their heads that Fin was not Jimmy’s sister or his cousin, but his wife. Their inability to get it right became genuinely unsettling the longer it persisted—Fin couldn’t understand why her constant correction didn’t help. It made her feel rather like a child insisting an imaginary friend was real to adults who indulged her fantasy with a nod and a smile. Or like the victim of a prank.

  It didn’t help her state of mind that neither her husband nor her friends could understand why it bothered her so much. They laughed off those awkward moments, but for Fin there was nothing amusing about it. She even confessed to Jimmy how much it was troubling her, but he did nothing to help, not even after the confusion resulted in a hostess not realizing she’d invited six of them to dinner. She’d assumed five.

  Fin started declining invitations. It was easier on her nerves to stay at home and read, or practice her archery, or to take the Ford on long drives around the island, to remote and wild locations that soothed her soul.

  She used Todd Rockmeteller’s Sea Songs as inspiration for these little day trips. Though at first she had been wary of Long Island and its pleasures, she came to love the various “moods of the bay.” She dusted off Jimmy’s binoculars and went birding to see for herself “the indignant look of the kingfisher / at the oystercatcher’s cry,” risked the awful mosquitoes to listen to the marshlands, and visited various farms to smell the “woodsmoke,” “fresh-turn’d earth,” and “heavy scent of livestock.”

  Fin had grown up in Philadelphia, and except for her years at school in the country she had always lived in the shadow of tall buildings, but she quickly agreed with Rockmeteller that any meadow or country road on Long Island was “as busy as the city, but twice as beautiful.” There was something about this place that just felt right to her. Every visit to some spit of rocky beach or shadowed forest felt like coming home.

  Fin was pleased as well to discover Rockmeteller’s other volume, The Ginger-Eaters, was every bit as good as Sea Songs, though much different. It was not a musing on nature and its virtues. It was, instead, a cautionary tale.

  While the style of The Ginger-Eaters was about as far from Tennyson’s poem as Tennyson’s was from Homer’s, the thematic overlap was obvious. In the poem, a nameless, troubled girl was lured into joining a coven of demon-worshippers. At first it was wonderful—she ate of the demon’s sacrament and found joy in her newfound enlightenment. They were all indeed “like Gods together, careless of mankind,” but only for a time.

  The longer the girl spent communing with the demon, the more of herself she lost to it. It fulfilled its promises to her, giving her peace through enhancing her experience of her five senses, but it was all a trick. By isolating her from everyone from her former life, the demon was able to change her so slowly, so subtly, but so profoundly that when her former friends and even family saw her, they didn’t recognize her. She didn’t notice it, either, until she could no longer tell if the meals she ate, the games she played, the clothes she bought, or even the lovers she took were ones she would have selected before her bargain.

  Reading it, Fin was reminded of the bargains she’d made that had gotten her where she was. She was also reminded, queerly, of a book she’d loved as a child by the American children’s book author “G. Baker.”

  Georgiana Baker was the author of twenty-seven novels for children, for the most part sweet little books with titles such as The Wet Day or What They Found in the Tree. Somewhat surprisingly, Baker had also been a member of the radical Social Democratic Foundation and a proponent of women’s sexual freedom, and had authored “Shackled by Love: An Argument for Lesbian Separatism” under the pen name Miss S. A. Pho.

  Baker had died in 1915 at the age of 47, one year after the publication of her final and her strangest novel, The Demon in the Deep. Usually, Baker’s protagonists were children, but T
he Demon in the Deep’s heroine was Susan Fentwick, a young woman of fourteen—which had been exactly Fin’s age when the book came out. The oldest of five children, Susan was brave and resourceful, like most of Baker’s heroines, but Fin had especially liked Susan’s no-nonsense attitude, fearlessness, devotion to her friends and family.

  Fin had also liked the villain of The Demon in the Deep, even if Miss Depth, with her white hair and white skin and black eyes, had genuinely frightened her. The thing was, she was also more sympathetic than the typical Baker villain. Miss Depth had no sinister designs on an orphaned child’s inheritance; no greedy desire to knock down a magical, historic home in order to build a polluting factory. Grief over her sister’s death had turned Miss Depth into the most terrifying, ruthless, and dangerous villain of them all.

  Fin had no idea why Rockmeteller’s poem might share any similarities at all with The Demon in the Deep, much less crucial details like demons being real and able to work their will in this world through man, losing one’s self being a potential consequence of their influence, and needing to consume something infused with demonic essence in order to communicate with them and share whatever power they possessed. In The Ginger-Eaters, that something was, naturally, ginger, and it gave the girl insight into beauty. In The Demon in the Deep, the villain conjured the demon into a regional delicacy called “beach plum jelly,” and it granted Miss Depth an understanding of the truth, and the ability to compel people to speak it.

  Fin had given her Baker books to charity when she’d put away childish things—but not The Demon in the Deep. That one was special; she had taken the train into New York City to get it signed when Baker was appearing at Hinds & Noble. Fin had read what Baker had written to her so many times as a girl, tracing her fingers over the spidery handwriting, that she could still recite it from memory:

  To my dear Delphine,

  I sincerely hope you never have need of the Truth, but if you do, let this book be a lantern to light your way. Everything in it is true.

  Yours,

  G. Baker

  That was another thing Rockmeteller and Baker had in common, come to think of it. The introduction to The Ginger-Eaters also claimed it was a work about the truth.

  Fin’s memory of her meeting with Baker had always unsettled her, as much as she loved the book and its author. Baker had been kind to her, gracious even, but she’d also been a bit, well . . . odd. Fin had felt like her favorite author’s eyes hadn’t been on her, but rather on something inside her as they spoke. And though Fin had planned to tell a few fibs to her idol—like most girls her age, she had wanted so badly to appear older, more sophisticated, better read—she hadn’t been able to. Every time she’d tried to lie Baker’s smile had just gotten wider, until it was almost predatory, as Fin stammered out the answer to every question truthfully.

  On the train ride home, as she read the inscription to herself, Fin had had a moment of fancy where she supposed Baker might have actually summoned the demon in the book. Susan had not been able to lie to Miss Depth, either.

  But of course that was impossible. She’d just been nervous.

  Still, the idea of summoning a demon that could extract the truth had always been uniquely appealing to Fin, now more than ever. She could use it on Jimmy, to better understand what he wanted from her and from their marriage, and on Bobbie, too. There was something going on with Bobbie that Fin could not perceive; some angle to her actions that eluded her. It wasn’t a bid for Jimmy—that, Fin could understand. It was something more subtle, and more dangerous.

  These thoughts rattled around Fin’s head as she reread The Ginger-Eaters while the rest of her companions chatted on the veranda, drinking pitcher after pitcher of some cool and bubbly drink. She’d lost the thread of their conversation, in part due to the liquor, but mostly because of Rockmeteller’s writing.

  “Nothing to add, kid?”

  Fin looked up, and blushed with embarrassment when she realized everyone was looking to her for some answer. She desperately searched for a clue in Jimmy’s tone or expression of what they might have been talking about, but there were none to be found.

  “I think it sounds perfectly lovely,” she said, hoping her response would disguise her inattention, and excuse her from further contributions to the conversation.

  “You think dealing with the mob will be perfectly lovely?” Edgar snickered as Jimmy, confused, said, “Maybe Bobbie’s right and it’ll be easy, but I can’t imagine what could be lovely about it.”

  “See, Fin agrees with me,” said Bobbie sweetly, looking from Jimmy to the also-skeptical Duke. But that wasn’t the case at all—actually, now that she knew what they were talking about, Fin strongly preferred they not get immediately involved with the Mafia so soon after moving to a new town, especially given that it was said Al Capone had many ties to Long Island’s sub-rosa booze trade.

  Before she could protest, however, Bobbie continued. “It’ll be easy—you’ll see. Rose says she knows the guy to talk to.”

  “Oh, well if Rose says so,” said Edgar, with affected irony. Bobbie shot him a look, which made him simmer down.

  “But Oscar—Oscar’s the guy who fixed the car,” said Jimmy, when Fin looked mystified, “—he knows that local smuggler. The way I see it, a local guy will be cheaper and less likely to . . . you know . . .” Jimmy shrugged uncomfortably. “Ask for favors later,” he said, lowering his voice as if someone might hear them.

  “A local smuggler,” Bobbie said the phrase with distaste, “who can get us what? Bathtub gin?”

  “Bobbie’s right,” said Lily. “Jimmy, there’s no way around this if we want the good stuff. A local bootlegger won’t have Bacardi and Veuve Cliquot, but we must get some. The Percys had it at their party, and everyone was so impressed.”

  Fin was amazed by the passion with which Lily spoke, especially as she’d never cared about anything less in her whole life than what the Percys might have served at some party she hadn’t gone to.

  “Oscar says the local stuff isn’t bad,” said Jimmy, looking to Duke for help, but no help was forthcoming.

  “Oh, I’m sure he thinks it’s swell,” said Edgar, with another nasty snicker.

  “But Bobbie, the mob,” protested Jimmy, clearly sensing he was losing this argument.

  “Everyone around here deals with them, and last I checked they haven’t all had their knees broken or been tommy-gunned to death in their own homes,” said Bobbie in a bored tone. Her sangfroid was impressive, but Fin couldn’t help but wonder how cool her friend would be if something actually did go wrong.

  “Yeah, but what about Oscar?” said Jimmy, grasping at straws. “He’ll be offended, maybe, if I don’t take him up on his offer, and he did such good work on the Ford.”

  “He’ll probably be more offended that he’s not invited to the party,” tittered Lily.

  “We could always invite him,” said Fin. The silence that followed was brief but heavy.

  “Invite the mechanic?” Duke chuckled. “That’s mighty white of you to suggest.”

  Fin stared at him. “I’m sure I don’t know what you mean,” she said icily. “Would you care to explain yourself?”

  Duke’s face went red. A few weeks ago, they’d had a row over some similar remark and the peace between them was a fragile one, born of agreeing to not discuss the matter further. At the time, Jimmy had begged her not to get into it with him again over what Fin considered to be some extremely objectionable and dismaying attitudes, to say the very least; then as now she felt justified in her response of “I won’t if he won’t,” which Jimmy had called childish.

  “Mechanics and moonshine! I thought we wanted to make a good impression on our neighbors,” said Bobbie, and for once, Fin was grateful to her friend for butting in. Duke was furious; he stood and took his leave of them, muttering under his breath. Lily followed after her husband, cooing at him like a dove. Fin pretended not to notice.

  “Maybe we’ll make a good impression by su
pporting the local economy,” said Fin. Jimmy, Edgar, and Bobbie all looked at her like she was insane; Fin blushed, embarrassed. “The local non-Mafia economy, I mean,” she added, which didn’t help.

  “I’m sorry, I’m confused,” said Bobbie. “I thought you’d agreed to the idea of buying from people who could sell us liquor that was distilled in some reputable way?”

  Fin knew she ought to keep quiet, or at least pretend to come around to Bobbie’s point of view, but she decided against it. It was a small matter to assert herself over, but if she didn’t want to end up a stranger in her own life, like the girl in The Ginger-Eaters, she had to start somewhere.

  “It just seems safer to work with a trusted local,” she said.

  Jimmy looked from one woman to the other, clearly unsure what to do. Curiously, it seemed to Fin that her siding with him had made him less fond of the idea of working with the local guy rather than more.

  “Well . . .” he said, rubbing the back of his head.

  “We’ll do what everybody decides is best,” said Bobbie, with a toss of her dark hair. She withdrew a cigarette from her silver case on the table, somehow managing to light and smoke it angrily.

  “Don’t believe that for a second,” said Edgar, also helping himself to a cigarette. “If she doesn’t get her way, she’ll pout.”

  “If I’m the only one who actually cares about it, maybe we just shouldn’t have this party,” said Bobbie, her tone so chilly Fin shivered even in the heat of the day.

  Jimmy looked panicked. “Let’s—let’s split the difference. We’ll get some from Oscar’s guy, and some from your friend. How does that sound?”

  Bobbie rolled her eyes. “If we have to have moonshine at the party to satisfy some sort of backwards local pride, I’d certainly rather it be some rather than all of what’s available to our guests.”