by Gail Cleare
“Well, are you pleased?”
Laurel’s voice came from behind me as I stood in the open front door looking out into the street. The sun was going down, and the streetlights dotted the sidewalks with bubbles of light.
“Everyone had a wonderful time, don’t you think?” she asked, coming to stand beside me. We leaned in the doorway cozily, two old pals.
Laurel had been in the kitchen cleaning up, supervising her staff as they re-packed the van.
“We actually made some pretty good sales,” I said.
“Most of the merchants from the neighborhood were here,” Laurel said.
“Thank you so much,” I said, “I could never have gotten through it without your help.”
“Sure you could Emily, you’re the perfect hostess,” she said. “Give yourself some credit, too!”
Across the intersection, we could see that the Green Thumb was hopping with business. All the outdoor tables were occupied, and we could see John serving cocktails behind the bar on the glassed-in porch.
“I guess I’d better get back across the street,” she said, and excused herself to check on her clean-up crew.
I heard voices behind me coming down the stairs, and Mr. Paradis appeared with his European friend. They shook hands formally, and Anton Novak slipped out the front door, saying “good night” to him and “au revoir” to me.
We locked eyes for a moment as he passed, and I couldn’t help wondering when our next encounter would occur. He was definitely flirtatious but even aside from the question of his marital status, as far as I knew he traveled constantly for his business. I was not terribly interested in a one-night stand, no matter how attractive the man might be. And frankly, I didn’t trust him. There was something kind of threatening about his smooth, practiced charm. He made me feel awkward and unsophisticated.
“Ms. Green is in the back, I presume?” Mr. Paradis interrupted my thoughts, waving his checkbook in the air. I nodded and he wended his way toward the rear of the building.
I stood alone in the doorway looking out into the street for a moment longer. I thought about what the children had said, “Welcome to Paradise!”
“Paradise,” I whispered aloud. I thought about what that word meant, to me.
I didn’t believe in conventional religion, but didn’t really consider myself an agnostic, either. I took a practical view of life and death, assuming that this is our one chance on the planet and we’d better make the most of it.
From time to time, however, I did get a sense that some kind of “higher power” might exist. Also, there did seem to be something very true in the idea of karma, the concept that your actions have an effect on your future “luck.”
In my personal view, paradise is much more likely to be a state we might achieve by pursuing experiences to evolve ourselves while here on Earth, rather than a magical place to go after leaving it.
From the mouths of babes, I thought.
Henry Paradis was the kind of reader who sat in one position, immersed in study, for such long hours that his knees would get stuck and he’d have trouble walking when he finally stood up.
He truly concentrated when he read. The kettle could boil, the phone could ring, the smoke alarm could go off, the world could end, and Henry would read on and on. A person could even stand in front of him clearing her throat repeatedly and not be in the room, as far as he knew.
I understood this about him now and had come to terms with it.
When I went up to say goodbye after everyone else had left that night, I found my employer in his office, sitting in his reading chair. I was prepared to back out the door and sneak off, but then I saw the three Chinese coins on the table. He was reading the I Ching. Intrigued, I stepped into the room. He immediately looked up at me.
“Welcome,” he said. He seemed alert and stimulated.
“We’ve finished downstairs now. They’ve all gone, I locked up,” I said, coming closer to take a seat in the chair opposite his. I was very curious, having read about this but never having seen it done before.
The parchment shade on the old brass floor lamp cast a yellow glow onto the low table between the two chairs, where he laid the open book. He had a little notebook in his lap too, with a pen, and he had been taking notes. I saw a hexagram inscribed there, a figure composed of a series of six stacked solid or broken horizontal lines. The broken or solid lines are achieved by throwing the coins and getting various combinations of heads or tails. So the results are determined by the luck of the toss. Each hexagram has a specific interpretation and spiritual lesson to be learned, as described in the book, which refers to itself as The Oracle.
“What does it say?” I asked him. “Did you ask about the success of the business?”
He smiled at me and put pen and notebook down on the table.
“It says, ‘It furthers one to cross the great water,’ which is very good!”
“Really!” I said. “But, do we have to go find a lake or something? Or, is that a symbol?”
“Exactly,” he nodded. “‘Crossing the great water’ is a large, important enterprise, something big and complicated, an investment of time and resources.”
“I see. Like, re-opening the store.”
“Yes. It furthers us to do this. It will be to our benefit.”
“Things are going to go well for us!” I was impressed.
“Yes. That’s what it says tonight.”
“Do you consult the Oracle often?”
He leaned back in his chair and pushed the tips of his fingers against each other thoughtfully.
“I discovered the wisdom of the I Ching many years ago, when I first traveled through Asia with my wife, Margaret.”
“When did you wife pass away?” I had wondered about this, but hesitated to ask.
“It was 1992, in December. Cold, that year. She had breast cancer, you know.”
“I’m so sorry, it must have been awful.”
“Yes, it took her very quickly,” he said, his expression solemn.
“Oh yes, I’ve heard that,” I said.
“I suppose the speed might be a blessing, though.” He stared into space.
“Yes, perhaps it is.”
“You never know, do we?”
“No, no, we don’t.”
“After Margaret was gone, I closed the store, you know.”
He looked at me briefly over the top of his glasses.
“Oh, that was what happened?” I said. “I wondered.”
“Yes.”
“I see.”
“I just didn’t have the energy any more,” he said quietly.
He looked down for a moment. I reached across the table and touched his sleeve. I leaned into the pool of yellow light.
“But now we’re supposed to cross the great water, right?”
He smiled at me and patted my hand.
“Yes, Emily. We shall cross it together.”
With his touch, a flash of the young man he must have once been came to me. I saw in my mind a young American making his way along a crowded street by the docks in some Asian port. When my eyes cleared Mr. Paradis was gazing into them with interest. He looked a bit sly for a moment then he picked up the brass coins, rubbing them between his fingers.
“You have a lot of wonderful things ahead of you, my girl. Let me assure you of that!”
“What? Oh no, you mean my future, you asked about me?”
“Of course, you are part of the scene now,” he said, perking up.
“The Scene? We have a Scene?”
“The scenario, the scenario. Part of the picture, around here.” He waved his arm in a vague circle.
“Ohhh, I see. Well?” I demanded, curious.
“Well what?”
“Well, what did it say about me?”
“Only good things. Success and great happiness,” he pronounced firmly.
“Totally? Wow. OK, that sounds good,” I tried to be persuasive. “Don’t suppose you want to be more specific?
”
“No, I don’t think so. Not tonight. Not yet.”
“I thought not. OK. Well, I’d better be off then,” I said, getting up to go.
“See you in the morning!”
“Yes, see you tomorrow,” I replied, feeling very glad of the fact.
He picked up his book again and started to read. As I left the room I glanced back, just to confirm that he was deeply entranced already, caught in the spell of the magical words. No real need to tiptoe quietly away, but I did anyhow.
The Hierophant
THE CONVENTIONS OF SOCIETY
Description: The Heirophant card symbolizes conventional religious authority.
Meaning: The conventions of society, traditional religion, the preacher. Criticism of those who are different.
In the days and weeks that followed, things started to settle into a pattern. I still spent most of my time off alone, but working at the store all day distracted me from my boring personal life. At home, I was depressed and lonely. I couldn’t wait to get back into the shop to talk to my employer and Siri, who was working there part-time now. When I arrived at work I fell on them like a ravenous beast, pumping my employer for esoteric trivia and making Siri tell me all the latest neighborhood news. Business was good, steady and growing. Our ads in the paper were starting to pay off. We sent out a postcard to the list of collectors, and they began to respond.
I came in at nine and had coffee at the kitchen table with Mr. Paradis while we discussed business and esoterica. He was teaching me how to recognize the ebb and flow of life, the seasonality of it. The metaphor of the I Ching is based on farming and politics, both of which involve assets and liabilities that rotate in a cyclical manner. He said that this model, though it was conceived over three thousand years ago, remains viable today. I was trying to be more aware of the weave of the universe, the patterns underlying reality. My anxiety level was diminishing as I began to see that things do not really happen at random.
Henry, as he urged me to call him, said that “magic” is all about using the invisible grid behind reality to strengthen the energy pathways toward various preferred results. He approached the whole idea in a scientific or mathematical manner. It was rather a lot for me to take in, but I was starting to get the point.
When I thought about my weird dreams, which had always forecast the future using the language of symbols, I could see that at any given point in my life it had certainly been possible to intuit the trends. If I did this, and then this happened, ultimately that was likely to result. The logic had a distinctly algebraic feeling to it. Therefore, making something happen “as if by magic” was a matter of putting together the right formula of circumstances and actions to inevitably lead to a certain goal.
“Very heady stuff!” Henry patted my hand as I scrunched up my face in skeptical bewilderment. “Tomorrow let’s discuss physics, my dear. You’ll get the connection. All the great magicians in history were scientists, you know. Take the alchemists, for example. And what is astrology, really? Not a fairy tale, as many believe, but an attempt to blend scientific observation of the natural world with intuitive analyses of the patterns of life. You’ll see, you’ll see…” He chuckled and flapped his hand at me as he shuffled out of the kitchen to head up the back stairs to his lair.
The shop opened at ten and I puttered around there by myself during the mornings. When Siri came in at about twelve-thirty, I talked her ear off for half an hour or so before taking my lunch break. Then I usually headed over to Sorrentino’s to get something to eat and sometimes walked to the little park down the street to sit in the sun and relax.
Other days I ended up spending my lunch break socializing. The second time I went into Sorrentino’s, a tiny woman with curly white hair stood behind the deli counter. Mr. Sorrentino introduced me to his wife. As I returned day after day, she and I grew better acquainted and I realized what a hub the place was for local information.
Josephina Sorrentino, or “Josie” as her husband called her, was the secret power behind their business. Her traditional southern Italian cooking was renowned, not just in the neighborhood but across the state. Her “Mama Sorrentino’s” brand of packaged dinners and tomato sauce was a raving success, sold out by noon on the weekends. On holidays, her special sausages were so popular they had to be ordered in advance. Many people stockpiled her food in their freezers.
Early every morning, Anthony Sorrentino (who she called “T”) started a huge pot of onions, green peppers, garlic, herbs, spices and canned Italian tomatoes. It sat simmering on the back burner. He mashed up a few anchovies and stirred them in, for extra flavor. The sauce cooked all day at a very low temperature, uncovered, until it had reduced down to a thick, luscious consistency that clung to the pasta with no need for added tomato paste. One day’s sauce went into the dishes Josie made for the next day’s sale.
In the small kitchen at the back of the store was a work-scarred wooden table where Josephina dispensed wisdom and philosophy while she cooked. I knew I had reached a certain level of acceptance in the neighborhood the day she beckoned to me and brought me back behind the deli counter.
“Sit,” she commanded, clearing a spot at the table. I obeyed, looking around curiously.
Her brown eyes sparkled behind thick black-framed glasses. She was so small that the big white chef’s apron wrapped all the way around her twice. A little step stool next to the stove raised her up high enough to reach inside the tall stainless steel cooking pots.
Taking a small bowl from a cabinet, she opened the oven and fished inside with a long-handled spoon. Amazing scents wafted out of the oven. Scooping out a dripping spoonful of something covered with melted cheese, she deposited it into the bowl. She set the bowl in front of me on the table, and pointed to a glass jar of spoons and forks.
“Eat,” she commanded, crossing her arms and waiting. I chose a fork, and dug in.
It was a green pepper stuffed with spicy sausage and mushrooms, oozing with tomato sauce and covered with a thick coating of melted mozzarella.
I chewed, swallowed and sighed blissfully. Josie smiled and nodded in satisfaction.
“It’s good,” she agreed. I thanked her and took another heavenly bite.
She poured two cups of coffee and put them on the table, then settled herself into the chair opposite me. The sleeves of her black cardigan sweater were pushed up above the elbows. She regarded me steadily as I ate, accepting my praise for her cooking in a placid manner, as one who has heard it many times before.
When I finished the stuffed pepper and raised my coffee cup, the real conversation began. Over the next half hour, she skillfully extracted my entire life story, from birthplace and family history to my most recent romance, to the saga of my previous job and its ignominious finale.
Being quizzed by Josie was like floating on your back in the ocean on a breezy day. By the time you sit up and take notice, you’re in very deep water.
But she gave as good as she got. In answer to my questions about her family and how she had met her husband, she dished up a tale full of evocative details, with humor as spicy as her meat sauce.
Anthony Sorrentino had come over from Italy when just a boy of twelve, sent by his parents to live with an aunt and uncle to take advantage of the economic opportunities he could access here. He had lived in an apartment building right around the corner, one block up Market Street. Josie was younger than he, and was literally the girl next door. Their families were friends.
“Much younger,” she stressed. “When he was a man of twenty, I was just fourteen, a young girl. He used to go around with my older brothers.”
“All the girls were in love with him,” she added, rolling her eyes dramatically. “They used to follow him down the street.”
“But he liked you, eh?” I smiled.
“Oh no,” she protested, “I was just the pesty little sister.”
“I didn’t think nothin’ of him,” Josie said, snapping her fingers. “But I liked to have f
un with my brothers, go to shows, go hear some music, like that. They let me hang around with them, sometimes. My mother would make them take me along.”
“So, you started to grow up and things changed?” I asked.
“Not me,” she said scornfully, “I didn’t change. I’m still paying no attention to him. But all the sudden he starts looking at me, and then he wants to go on a date!”
She grinned and nodded her head, affirming the unbelievable.
“I’m the only one, of all the girls, who doesn’t care—and guess who is the one he wants to chase!”
She chuckled, crinkling up her eyes.
“So, you went out with him then?”
“Oh no,” she shook her head, “I thought he was an old man! Way too old for me! By then he was, oh, at least twenty-two. I pretended he was joking.”
That really cracked me up, as I pictured her pretending not to know he was really asking her out. What a hot ticket she was, as my Dad used to say. I wished I could have known her back then, in the old days. I resolved to call my mother that evening and repeat the whole story to her.
Josie told me Anthony had pursued her for two more years before she took his suit seriously and agreed to a real date. Six months later, they were married. A year after that, their first son was born. Joseph was a lawyer now and lived across town. Their second son, Robert, was a high school teacher. He lived upstairs with his wife and two children. Josie explained that over their business, the house had been divided into two separate apartments.
The third Sorrentino son, Rocco, ran the pizzeria next door. He had bought the building, and lived in an apartment over his restaurant. He had been married and divorced, and with no children.
“Rocco is single now,” she said, looking over at me and obviously considering my likewise status. “He works so hard, he never has time to get out. That’s why he didn’t come to meet you at the opening night.” She seemed anxious for me to not be offended at his absence.
