“Oliver and I are just friends,” I said loftily.
“Hey, don’t think I’m, like, jealous. I don’t like icky boys. Although I personally think your friend Oliver may be a member of the He-Man Women-Haters Club. Uno amigo de Dorothy, if you take my meaning.”
She dropped her voice. “I tell you, Sweeney, you oughta be selling time-shares in that boy. I mean if you’re not sleeping with him. ‘Cause I know that Angelica—”
I turned to her, furious, but Annie backed off. “Ex-cu-use me!”
We sat in silence as the car inched through rush hour traffic. Outside, all the sultry glamour of the city had vanished. The Washington Monument looked smudged and worn against the dirty white sky, the distant shape of the Jefferson Memorial like a great cracked egg hidden among dusty trees. Above Haines Point an endless line of aircraft roared into National Airport. Between the noise and exhaust fumes, the Lysol stench of Brother John’s car deodorizer and all the beer I’d drunk, I felt distinctly queasy.
“You know where we’re going, don’t you?”
Annie nudged me, but I refused to look at her. “You know what this is, right?” she persisted. “This Orphic Lodge?”
I waited a long moment before shaking my head. “No.”
“It’s their headquarters. Summer camp for your boy Balthazar and all the rest of them. Home base. Ground Zero. Your retreat business is a trap, Sweeney—”
Her words were like a window slamming shut behind me.
“—a fucking trap, and we’ve walked right into it.”
If the retreat house was a trap, it was a very nice one.
It took us nearly three hours to get there. I dozed, an achy hung-over nap that brought little in the way of real repose and gave me uneasy dreams of pursuit and flight. When I woke it was just past nightfall. Outside all was dim and softly moving, painted in shades of green and black and violet. The little car wheezed and bucked as it made one hairpin turn after another, climbing higher and higher. Suddenly we made a sharp turn, veering onto an even narrower road. The car jounced over stones and fallen branches, abruptly came out into a wide space where the trees fell back and the sky opened above us, black and studded with stars.
“Well, we’re here,” said Brother John, and we piled out.
The Orphic Lodge was the sort of place where you spend one enchanted August as a child, and devote all of your adult life to finding again. A sprawling Craftsman-style mansion, its pillared verandas and balconies and gabled windows thrusting out in bewildering profusion. When we stepped onto the front porch the wooden flooring boomed and creaked beneath our feet, as though we were walking on ice. Upside-down Adirondack chairs and wicker sofas were pushed against the walls. There was an air of genteel desolation about it all—the grey limbs of an espaliered pear tree; drifts of dead leaves everywhere; the echoing of ghostly voices from upstairs rooms where windows had been flung open to the chill night air.
But inside, the Lodge looked more like the first day of vacation. Students running up and down steps, back and forth between cars and the kitchen, carrying duffel bags and knapsacks and boom boxes, cartons and bags of food, paper towels, beer, wine. A fat, friendly-looking grey cat sat on a windowsill and regarded us all with mild yellow eyes. On a wider windowsill in the main foyer Balthazar Warnick did the same, though with a more feral gaze. Beside him stood a tall stern-featured woman, with black hair and very black straight eyebrows, wearing a paisley dress and old-fashioned chef’s apron.
“…said thirteen and I have made dinner for thirteen. Gravadlaks and salat, and the gravadlaks, the salmon, will not keep well. And those boys are spilling something on the stairs.”
“Thirty, Kirsten, I said there would be thirty. Mr. Bright, would you please assist Mr. Malabar with the cooler?” Balthazar looked distractedly at the tall woman. “We brought spaghetti for dinner tonight, Kirsten. We always have spaghetti the first night of retreat. You know, lots of water boiling, many eager hands at work. A sort of icebreaker.”
The housekeeper gazed suspiciously at the many eager hands now reaching for the cooler Hasel Bright had opened in the middle of the floor.
“Good night, Professor Warnick, they deserve their spaghetti,” she announced. “I am going to bed.”
“Our housekeeper does not approve of undergraduates drinking in the lodge.” Professor Warnick frowned at Hasel, who sheepishly replaced his bottle and closed the cooler. “Let’s get unpacked and get dinner going before she changes her mind and comes back to supervise the kitchen, eh Mr. Bright?”
Warnick turned to where Annie and I were standing, somewhat at a loss, by the front door. He regarded me measuredly before saying, “The girls’ rooms are in the east wing on the second floor. To the right.”
We straggled upstairs, yelling greetings back to the others, who’d already unpacked or were still arriving below.
“Where do you think Angelica is?” I panted. “She’s got to be here; they were in the lead car with Warnick.”
Annie shrugged, pausing red-faced to swing her guitar and one of Angelica’s bags to the other arm. “Who knows? She and Oliver are probably settled in the honeymoon suite already.”
The rooms in the east wing all seemed pretty much the same. A few simple camp-style beds lined up against the pine walls, unmatched curtains at the windows, maybe a worn rag rug on the floor. Annie stopped wearily in front of an open door.
“The view from this room is really terrific, Sweeney, I read about it in the promotional literature downstairs; this is like the best room in the whole place, okay?”
“Okay,” I said, and then Angelica appeared in the dim hallway.
“Sweeney! Annie! I got a room for us—down here, the third door on the left.”
“Hooray,” said Annie. She dumped Angelica’s stuff on the floor and took off down the hall with her guitar.
Angelica picked up her bags and smiled. “Thanks for bringing my bags, Sweeney.”
“Sure.” I rubbed my shoulder. “Where’s Oliver?”
“Oh, he’s around.” She smiled, a secretive delighted smile, and started after Annie. “I helped him get settled upstairs. I think he went down to help with dinner. Okay, this is it—isn’t it great?”
It actually didn’t look much different from any of the other rooms—bigger, maybe, with four beds extending from the far wall, and it did have its own bathroom with shower stall and ancient rust-stained pedestal sink where Annie was already noisily washing up. But the long far wall was filled with windows, and even in the darkness I could make out the shadowed hump of the mountains and the velvety star-filled sky.
“Yeah. Yeah, really, it’s nice.” I dropped my knapsack on one of the beds and flopped onto it. “Yow. Nice mattresses, too.”
“Mine is stuffed with corncobs,” announced Annie from the bathroom. “I sure do hope Oliver’s not sleeping in that other bed, Angelica.”
Angelica shook her head. “No, he’s not. Cornhusks, Annie; I don’t think anyone ever stuffed a mattress with corncobs. Come on, Sweeney, I told Oliver we’d help them out downstairs. We’ll see you later, Annie.”
Annie watched us go, nonplussed. In the hall Angelica took my hand. “God, this is so great here! Isn’t this great?”
I shrugged and tried to smile. We still hadn’t talked about what happened that night after the Molyneux reception, but obviously Angelica wasn’t the type to discuss such things. And I was burning to hear about Oliver, and to find out what room he was staying in.
But Angelica only laughed, pausing to pull her hair back into its loose ponytail. “Oliver says from his room you can lie in bed and watch Orion progress across the western horizon.”
I smiled ruefully “Progress, huh? How does he know? He hasn’t been here before—”
“No.” Angelica started down the corridor. “He’s never been here, but his brothers have. I guess they told him which room was the best one…” Her voice trailed off.
“So—I guess you guys are really like, involved, huh?”
I laughed as I said it, but I knew I sounded lame and jealous. Though probably I couldn’t even have told you what, exactly, I was jealous of. Angelica, I suppose, but it was stupid to be jealous of Angelica—like being jealous of the Mona Lisa. And really, what could be better? My two best friends were in love with each other. Only that left me somewhere in between, running back and forth like a stupid yappy little dog; because I was in love with both of them.
“Oh, you know Oliver…” She sighed. “I can tell you one thing, though. My father would hate him.”
“How come?”
We started down a wide stairway. “Oh, everything. The drugs, the partying all the time. Just the way he is. Okay, I think the kitchen’s over there—”
We found the kitchen, large and brightly lit and filled with huge gleaming stainless steel stoves and sinks and refrigerators. Small hand-lettered signs admonished everyone to wash their hands and put things back where they’d found them. Balthazar Warnick was nowhere in sight, but Hasel Bright was bent over a sink by the wall, pumping furiously at an old-fashioned hand pump and shouting excitedly as water gushed out.
“Look at this! It’s amazing—” yelled Hasel.
I peered into the deep slate sink, the water sluicing down a small hole in the middle. “Isn’t there running water?”
Hasel looked at me, red-faced and grinning. “Yeah, sure there is, but isn’t this amazing? I’ve been doing this for fifteen minutes, and it never stops!”
I laughed. “Wow. That really is great, Hasel. Maybe later you’ll invent the wheel.”
I crossed to where Oliver and Baby Joe and Angelica stood before one of the big gas ranges. Oliver was poking thoughtfully at an immense steaming pot with a wooden spoon. Baby Joe was smoking a cigarette, occasionally leaning over to tap his ashes into the pot. Angelica was watching Oliver, her brow furrowed.
“You want it to be just barely al dente,” she said primly. “Do you know how to tell when it’s done?”
“Yes.” Oliver leaned forward on the balls of his feet and dipped his utensil into the roiling water. He backed up, shaking his head to clear the steam from his glasses, then dramatically flicked the wooden spoon and sent several long streamers of spaghetti sailing toward the ceiling. Baby Joe and Angelica ducked as a few of them sailed back down, but Oliver nodded.
“It’s done when it sticks,” he said. I looked up and saw the ceiling mapped with dozens of darkened threads of dried pasta, and among them several fresh and glistening strands. “And it’s done.”
We ate in the dining room, a big open space with raftered ceiling and chandeliers made of antlers. I counted thirty-two of us, students and grad students and Balthazar Warnick, the only genuine adult present although I assumed the housekeeper was brooding elsewhere. The room was dark and drafty. There were citronella candles in little red glasses at every table, and spongy Italian bread from the Safeway back in D.C., and gallon bottles of Gallo Burgundy. I sat at a long table with Annie and Angelica and Oliver. Behind us Baby Joe and Hasel talked and laughed loudly, watching the rest of us, but especially Angelica, as they passed around bowls of spaghetti and iceberg lettuce drenched with bottled dressing.
“Hey, we’re having a party later. You want to come?”
“Keep it down, man.” Hasel tilted his head across the room to where Balthazar Warnick sat with half a dozen well-behaved graduate students.
Baby Joe lowered his voice. “Upstairs. Oliver knows which room it is.”
Angelica smiled and looked at Oliver. “Oliver knows where everything is.”
Annie stuck her finger in her throat and made a gagging noise. “I’m out of here. It’s either help with the dishes tonight or do breakfast in the morning.” She grabbed her plate and stood. “Later, guys.”
Oliver grinned as he watched her leave. He leaned back in his chair, and Angelica turned sideways in her seat so that she could lean against him. “There goes Jiminy Cricket,” he said.
Angelica closed her eyes and nestled closer to him. “This is wonderful. Isn’t it wonderful, Sweeney?”
“Absolutely, it’s wonderful.” I stacked our dishes and left them what remained of the bottle of wine. “I guess I’ll see you later, then.”
“I’ll find you,” Angelica called. “Oliver says they’ll make a fire later in the big room down here.”
In the kitchen I dumped the dishes into the sink and hoisted myself onto a counter. “I’m a morning person,” I said to Annie. “I’ll watch you clean and I’ll do breakfast tomorrow.”
A few other people straggled in, dropping off plates, drying a few glasses and dishes before wandering off again. Hasel bounded through, eyeing the slate sink and pump longingly, but Annie yelled at him to leave. He stuck his hands in the pockets of his torn jeans and sauntered out the door.
“Now don’t you all forget to come to our party,” he yelled.
“Maybe if he had two brain cells to rub together, he could start a fire,” Annie said, and sighed. “You know, the only reason I came along was to keep an eye on Angelica. And now look at me.”
“It seems kind of laid-back,” I said at last. “I mean, nothing weird is going on. It all seems pretty quiet. Kind of boring, actually.”
Annie swiped at her sweating face with a dish towel and nodded. “Yeah, I know. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe I’m just paranoid.”
“Well, you’ve got some reason to be paranoid. I mean we all do, I guess, you and me and Angelica, at least.”
“If I were you, I’d be worried about Oliver.”
“Oliver? How come?”
Annie stared out one of the black windows. “Look at him! He’s wasted all the time. And he hangs out at those places in Southeast—”
“So do I.”
“Yeah, but it’s different for you, Sweeney. I mean, no offense, but underneath all that black eye makeup and stuff, you’re kind of—well, kind of normal. But Oliver just seems to be too unstable to be doing all this stuff—”
“Oliver is brilliant,” I said hotly. “He says he wants to be a visionary, a—”
Annie put on her best long-suffering expression. “Boy, no one can tell you anything, can they?” She squeezed a stream of grungy water from her sponge and wiped her hands on her fatigues. “Well, I’m done. Tell Hasel Bright he can come back now and pump all he wants.”
After she left I sat there for a long time, chatting with whoever happened through. Somebody brought in a half-empty bottle of red wine and I drank most of that, filling and discarding paper cups as they disintegrated into a soggy red mass. After an hour or so I left, taking the rest of the wine with me. When I got to our room the light was on. Angelica stood in front of the bathroom mirror, curling her eyelashes. She smiled at me and waved her mascara wand.
“Hi! I was hoping you’d come back up—I couldn’t find you downstairs.”
I flopped onto the bed nearest her, the wine bottle at my feet. It was dark. She hadn’t turned on the lights in the rest of the room, but I saw a hurricane lantern on the windowsill behind me. I picked it up and slid open the metal hatch on the side, where a box of matches was stored. “I figured you and O wanted some time alone together.”
“Well, we did.” She turned back to the mirror and wiped a smudge of mascara from beneath one eye. “But you could have come with us, Sweeney…
“I kind of felt like a third wheel.”
“Fifth wheel.”
“Whatever. I felt like a wheel.” I cupped the hurricane lantern in my hands, and asked, “Listen, Angelica—you mind telling me a little bit about what’s going on here?”
She dotted carmine gloss on her lower lip and rubbed it in very slowly. When she was finished she looked at me. “You mean with Oliver and me?”
“I mean with everything.”
“Sweeney.” She tilted her head and smiled with maddening sweetness. “My dear soul mate. Are you jealous?”
“No, I’m not jealous. I’m just—I guess I don’t know what I am,” I sighed. I gulped a mouthfu
l of wine from the bottle and grimaced. “Gah. This stuff is awful.”
Angelica regarded me shrewdly. “Perhaps it would taste better if you didn’t drink so much of it. But okay. Twenty questions. What do you want to know?”
“The Benandanti.”
She said nothing.
“Who they are,” I said. “What they are.”
“We—ell.” She took a deep breath. “They’re sort of a sacred priesthood.” She said it matter-of-factly, as though she’d announced “They all went to Harvard” or “They play in a foursome every weekend at Burning Tree.”
“What does it mean?”
“Benandanti.” The word slid off her tongue. “It means ‘The Good Walkers,’ or sometimes ‘Those Who Do Well.’ They started in the Middle Ages, in Italy—I mean their whole sort of organized way of doing things dates back that far, to the eighth century, I think. You can find accounts of them in records from the Inquisition. But really they’re much, much older. They go back thousands and thou-sands of years, my father told me once.”
She stopped and reached for the wine bottle, as though she was going to take a sip, but then thought better of it. I took another swig and asked, “But what do they do? I mean, is it like the Masons or something, that you can’t talk about?”
“No—well, yes, some of it is. Most of it, I suppose; at least there are things my father has never told me, and I guess he never will. Because I’m a woman, and women are—well, they’re not exactly forbidden, I mean there’ve always been a few women—Magda Kurtz was one—but as far as the Benandanti are concerned, women are just sort of beside the point.”
I frowned and let this sink in. “Is it part of the Church, then? I mean, there they all are at the Divine, all these priests and rabbis and ministers running around—”
Angelica shook her head emphatically. “No. It’s not a religious thing—at least, it’s not just a religious thing. It’s more like the Church is part of the Benandanti—like all these churches and religions and things are part of it. There are members everywhere, all over the world. The Masons, the Vatican, Bohemian Grove, Skull and Bones… It’s like the ultimate Old Boys’ Network.”
Waking the Moon Page 19
