by E. J. Olsen
My loyalty to Corktown and the fact that the intermittent classes I was taking at Wayne State weren't going to pay for themselves led me to O'Leary's Tearoom at Brooklyn and Porter, where I took a job waiting tables and reading tarot cards in the afternoons for rich ladies from West Bloomfield or Northville who had nothing better to do than to seek out the novelty of a town that they were too dim or too dismissive to see was drowning before their eyes. They lifted the homemade shortbread to their lips with soft, tanned hands and tapped manicured nails against off-white china cups as they sipped Irish Breakfast tea while waiting their turn at the tarot table. Mrs. O'Leary was the true psychic, though, had worked hard to teach me the cards herself, but she never ever read for these women. She served their scones and muffins with a smile, poured their tea while exchanging pleasantries, but later she would say what small, sad lives they lived, that she couldn't read for them because she'd have to tell the truth. Honesty above all else was her motto, and the motto of her mother and her mother's mother, ad infinitum, traveling in the minds and sensibilities of the O'Leary women from across the Atlantic, remaining intact all the way from County Cork. The words, in Gaelic, had been carved into a wooden plaque and hung over the front door of the tearoom. Locals can handle it, she said, the Irish are strong, practical, resilient. But if she told these women the truth, they'd never come back, and then where would we be? That's why I read for them. It wasn't that I didn't believe in the truth, I just wasn't a good enough psychic to see it. What I saw clearly were the women's designer clothes and leather shoes, their diamond-studded watches and sharp haircuts, and their lives didn't look small to me, but, as I said, I was never able to see the things that Mrs. O'Leary did. Telling this story now makes me miss everything: the weed-smothered Trumbull lot, Tiger Stadium glowing like an earthbound constellation, the tearoom with its lace doilies and antique spoons, Mrs. O'Leary with her black tooth and her visions of misery.
She did not see good things in Detroit's future; she said she dreamed of flood waters gushing over the banks of the Detroit River, a tidal wave as tall as Cobo Hall consuming Grand Circus Park, then fanning eastward to smother Greek-town and westward to our very doors, water rising to overtake the front steps of Corktown's crumbling worker's cottages. She stared at the window, and it was as if she could see the nightmare being projected there. "Begorra," she said, fingering the Celtic cross over her breast, her eyes far, far away, "there was a torrent on Porter, and we were in it, you and me, the tearoom gone, my china cups bobbing around like corks." After noticing my horrified expression she smiled. "Ah!" she said. "Just a silly dream. It's this casino stuff's got me thinking too much."
Despite the fact that citizens had twice voted against it, the mayor had just granted a license to MGM to build a casino in Detroit, and Mrs. O'Leary said she'd be damned to hell and roasted crisp before she sat back and let them build.
"They're all crooked," she'd said, the Free Press and Detroit Monthly spread across the table before her. "Politicians steal our money and give it to these greed mongers. This one's mother died, this one's wife's having an affair. What do they care as long as they can build their casino? Come here and look at what they're doing to your city." She made me read about the latest political graft or look at the smug grin of a socialite newly arrived on Detroit's small glamour circuit. "Look at that," she'd say, poking her chubby finger into the face of the offender, her tone bursting with rancor. Sometimes I'd see her pull out the White Pages, address an envelope in her looping cursive, and drop her business card inside, and I'd wonder who was on the receiving end of her selective advertising. But she wrote many letters: to her family back in Cork, to the newspapers, to watchdog groups, to the mayor's office. Though I was young, my future not necessarily tied to Corktown, even I understood her anger over its recent state, her worry over the fate of her business. Mrs. O'Leary, for her part, was convinced that if the MGM people knew how desperate the people of Detroit were— Who's going to put fifty dollars down on a blackjack table? They'll come in and rob the place, that's what they'll do!—they would thank the mayor kindly and be on their way.
"Go read their tarot," I said. "Tell them they'll be sorry."
"You can laugh," she countered, "but these businessmen wouldn't bring their families here if they knew how dangerous it was. They wouldn't want to open a casino if something happened to stop them. And this is a place where bad things happen." I laughed at her naïveté, for I wasn't too young to know that there's no stopping the push of capitalism. Actually, the casino was just the latest impediment in her drive to save Detroit: She was working to have Archer impeached, the new Tiger Stadium—she would not say the words "Comerica Park"—boycotted, and Mike Ilitch run out on a rail.
This is the history of the story I'm trying to tell you, the thing that happened in the tearoom, the thing that I can tell you now that Mrs. O'Leary is dead. All that fear and sadness drove Mrs. O'Leary to do what she did, but who's to say that under similar pressure you wouldn't have done the same thing?
It should not surprise you, then, that he appeared before us on a desperate night, for there were many desperate nights in Corktown after the close of the '99 season. Perhaps I should have taken as portents what I dismissed simply as the manifestations of a dying city as I walked to work that day: a man running down Trumbull with a pair of crutches under his arm, a woman pushing a baby stroller full of empty bottles, a car without a passenger door cruising slowly up Leverette. That night the sleet was driving down, little needles piercing the gray snow below, and even though the tart smell of cabbage was making me queasy, the drone of the rain and the six-block walk home kept me there long after I should have left, flipping cards in a Hearts and Spades game against my employer. We were on display at Mrs. O'Leary's favorite linen-covered table in the front window of the tearoom, which always made me feel like a target at night, but Mrs. O'Leary seemed oblivious to the paranoia of a fearful mind. Is it an indictment of Mrs. O'Leary's psychic ability to say that when the doorbell chimed we both gasped? Why? Because we hadn't expected anyone, of course; we couldn't imagine anyone strolling around in the knifelike torrent. But there he was.
The man who stood before us looked as if he'd just walked out of a movie—chiseled features, dripping trench coat, brown fedora. We stared at him, and Mrs. O'Leary said, "I'll get the tea."
"That's all right," he said. "I don't need any tea."
"Yes you do," she said. "Sit down."
The man—he couldn't have known, the cards weren't out—sat at the tarot table, far from the dark front windows. "My car broke down on Bagley," he said as Mrs. O'Leary placed a teacup before him, and by the way she smiled, showing only the lower left corner of her blackened tooth, I knew she didn't believe him. Though she had a stockpot of food warming in the kitchen, she never offered him any—do you see what I mean about the way she knew things?
The man took a small sip of his tea and smiled. Later I'd learn that she'd put two fingers of Ballantine's in his cup, that she knew he needed it, and you didn't have to be a psychic to see that he was thankful. Mrs. O'Leary nodded at me, as if we'd earlier set up a system of communication that would tell me exactly what to do, but my psychic abilities, as usual, failed. Though she'd been teaching me the tarot for two months, I still struggled. I knew the meaning of the cards—I'd memorized them as easily as I'd mentally charted who owned each car in the Trumbull lot—but when I had to transplant their meanings into the lives of the people who sat before me, their fear and exhilaration always seemed to short circuit my intuition. She nodded again, then turned to the man, who had removed his hat to reveal a thick head of red-blond hair, and said, "Why don't you have your tarot read while you wait?"
He looked at her expectantly, as if that is precisely why he'd come, as if she'd read his mind. I recall thinking that I had read his mind too, just then, that my skills had kicked in, that my intuitive antennae were finally picking up signals from the psychic airwaves around me. I was suddenly convinced that he had come
to us deliberately, desperately, and I knew then that I would be the one to save this poor soul, this gorgeous man. Is arrogance not the downfall of the fool? Before Mrs. O'Leary could stand up, I had stationed myself across from him and pulled the tarot pack from its green silk pouch. That she believed me incapable of doing any real harm seemed clear when she poured herself three fingers of Ballan-tine's and embarked on a game of solitaire at the small table where she had been winning all night. Perhaps that was yet another missed sign?
"All right, then," I said to the man before turning on the tape recorder. "For five dollars you can buy a cassette of the reading." This was something the rich ladies loved, for they'd often repeat the same questions, their recall apparently faulty.
Mrs. O'Leary, her back to us, sighed heavily and shook her head, and the man stared at me like I was insane. He then shrugged and draped his wet coat over a vacant chair beside us, and I imagined I could smell the taunting rain and bitter smoke in its folds, fear seeping into my nostrils like ammonia. I started turning cards immediately after he'd cut them, eager, too eager, I see now, to test my newfound skills.
The first card was the two of Wands, a lone, lost man with his back turned, the card of mortification. This card meant that the man before me had received news, bad news. Next came the Empress, crowned in stars and robed in gold, signaling his involvement with a strong, wealthy woman, but isn't that common amongst handsome men? At any rate, I turned the third card, a reversed Ace of Pentacles, a gargantuan hand clutching an oversized coin and symbolizing the dark side of wealth.
"You've had some bad luck," I said, hoping for some type of acknowledgment from him, but he was like a stone.
I turned more cards: The four of Cups, an inconsolable man, then the two of Pentacles: fear, obstacles, romantic entanglement.
"There is a woman," I said. "She is raven-haired. She is powerful. She is tormented." Of course, I didn't know for certain that the woman in charge of his troubles was raven-haired— only Mrs. O'Leary would know that—but I think it was a safe bet that a woman was at the root of his unhappiness, for my father had always said a woman is at the root of most men's unhappiness, and I pretty much had a one-in-four shot at getting hair color right.
The man's tension was wreaking havoc on my psychic radar, and it shut down entirely when he whispered his first question: "Is she going to kill me?"
The women from Grosse Pointe and Bingham Farms never asked questions like this. They wanted to know if their husbands would be promoted, if their sons would get into Yale, if they would be safe under the scalpel during plastic surgery. I turned the seven of Cups, which is merely a dark child. "Not yet," I said. "Maybe never."
Next came the eight of Cups, the child growing.
"But she's thinking about it." How else can one read that sequence? Mrs. O'Leary, God rest her soul, was no help at all, staring into the abyss framed by the window and humming "Danny Boy" while thumbing the handle on her Prince Albert china cup.
The reversed Queen of Swords was next. It had to be the woman, right?
"She's here," I tapped the card, recalling the textbook definition in the Pictorial Key to the Tarot. "This queen has intentions that, in the reversed position, can not be exercised."
The man looked from me to the card and back again, frowning.
"She's upside down," I said. "Immobilized. Her sword is useless in this position."
He tilted his head. "I see," he said, absently running his fingers along the belt of the trench coat beside us before downing his remaining tea. What did he see? I wondered, and I had to stop myself from asking.
I then turned the King of Swords, handsome, troubled, the least wealthy of the four kings.
"This is you," I said. Who else could it be?
"And?"
And I was blank. Nothing. "And you're in some kind of trouble." It was an idiotic thing to say—you didn't need a tarot pack to figure that out—but it was also safe. Was I in over my head? Should I have summoned Mrs. O'Leary out of what I thought was her liquor-induced complacency, admitted to having nothing more than a good memory for the cards, ended the reading right there? Certainly, but there's no use in posing those questions now (though on the blackest nights I often do).
I turned the six of Pentacles, prosperity, followed by the Knight of Pentacles, more prosperity, and then I sat there staring at the cards as if the characters on them would speak, waiting for something to happen. Then it did.
"This Knight of Pentacles," Mrs. O'Leary murmured from across the room, "is your queen's husband. A dangerous man."
"But he's not a king," the man argued.
I stared at the cards, the King of Swords lying beside the Queen of Swords on the table. "You're her king," she answered, "without a kingdom."
I remained silent and next turned the ten of Swords. Let me make it clear that no one told me to do that. No one told me to turn another card, but I did.
"What is it?"
"Nothing," I said.
"He's on the ground with swords in his back. That doesn't look like nothing."
Mrs. O'Leary put her head down then. At the time it meant little to me, but now, before I take my sleeping pills, before I ask myself why I didn't walk out of the tearoom and not look back, before I blame the closing of the stadium for what transpired, the vision of Mrs. O'Leary folding her head forward, as if in prayer, haunts me. The man knew, even if he didn't know for certain, what even I could see: This was the card of horrific death.
"Tell me," he said.
"It's bad." I stared at him. "I see the raven-haired woman." And I did. Was it the night? Was it the sudden appearance of this troubled man in this troubled neighborhood with his questions of death that triggered a vision more clear than if she'd been standing before me in the flesh? I saw her, or I called her up from some deep place of knowing: a thick bowl of black hair sprouting from a sharp widow's peak, blunt red talons, a smile like a blade in her teeth. "It's bad," I repeated.
"Yes," he said, leaning back in his chair and setting his chin like a man about to take a punch. He stared at the cards intently, almost as if he could read them, and said, "It's bad."
My heart constricted, and I understood for the first time the true depth of Mrs. O'Leary's burden: How could she channel all this pain and heartache? No wonder she drank Ballantine's, no wonder her tooth had rotted from the toxic news that had washed over it each time she read a tarot. My head was pounding, and I had to remind myself to breathe. "Maybe this is enough for now," I said.
The man nodded at the deck in my hand, and as I slowly turned the next card, an upside-down knight wielding a large gray sword, Mrs. O'Leary said, "The reversed Knight of Swords spells doom. Do you want another card?"
The man nodded again, and it was then that I realized how little he'd spoken.
"Are you certain you want another card?" Mrs. O'Leary was staring at the plaque above the door looking like misery propped up in a chair. She could not have seen the cards from where she sat, even with her glasses on, but as I turned the most feared card in the tarot, the skeleton coming to claim on his white horse, she said, "Death may not be imminent, but it is present."
"I know," he sighed. "I know."
Next came the six of Swords, the symbol of painful journey, and I dared not recite the definition of the card as it appeared in this sequence: "Your death will be violent." But I didn't have to, because Mrs. O'Leary did.
Mrs. O'Leary was never comfortable telling clients that tarot readings are for entertainment purposes only, that they are not to be considered financial, legal, or psychological counseling, but we always did. And that's what she told the detectives who showed up at O'Leary's three days after the skeleton slipped the tape into the pocket of his trench coat and threw a fifty on the table.
"I heard on the news," she said. "But I can't help you."
"Well, you can't claim client privilege," said the elderly detective in a cheap suit as he pulled the tape from his briefcase and slid it across the table. "Who
's the other voice on the tape? Doesn't sound like you."
"It's mine," she said, "there's no one else here does tarot. It's a cheap tape, bad quality."
Through a crack in the saloon doors that opened onto the kitchen I watched the detectives exchange looks.
"It was just a wee bit of fun," said Mrs. O'Leary with badly played nonchalance. "He came in to get out of the weather."
"Well, it doesn't sound very funny to me," said the detective with the acid trip necktie. "Does it sound funny to you?" he asked Cheap Suit, who shook his head.
"See that? Neither of us finds it funny. Maybe we lack a sense of humor, but for some reason we just don't find murder funny."
When I saw Mrs. O'Leary crumple to the chair before enlisting the exaggerated brogue she engaged only under the most stressful circumstances, I wanted to rush out of the kitchen and take the blame for something horrible, something I didn't yet fully understand, for a death I could have prevented. But I didn't.
"Sounds to me like Mr. Donegan felt he was going to be killed," said Necktie. "Now, how do you suppose he came to that conclusion?"
"Aye, he knew it when he walked in."
