Huakinthos. The flower of Adonis. A wood hyacinth.
There were lights burning in the carriage house when we returned. Balthazar and Robert Dvorkin stood on the sidewalk, waiting for us to go inside.
“I won’t expect to see you in the office for several days,” Robert said.
Annie rolled her eyes. “Gee, what a prince.”
“Good-bye, Sweeney,” said Balthazar. Again he had the barest hint of a smile. Unexpectedly he raised his hand and waggled his finger at me, just as he had that first night at Garvey House. “We’ll be in touch.”
Annie stared as the two Benandanti walked back to the main house. “Goody. Next time, why don’t you just send a neutron bomb?” she muttered. Then we went inside.
Annie spent the night, and Dylan of course—I held him so tightly that more than once he woke, and I bit my lip to keep from crying out as he clutched me to his chest. When I finally slept I dreamed of the sun on blue waves, the warm fresh wind rushing down from a stony mountaintop and the smell of hyacinths perfuming the air.
Annie left the next morning, after having a very protracted telephone conversation with her lover. “Sorry, Sweeney. Helen is frantic and just about ready to come after me with a flaming sword, so I better go. But I’ll be in touch,” she added, grinning. “Just like everybody else. Now that I know how to find you.”
She looked at me soberly for a minute, then said, “I have an idea, something I want to talk to you about after—after all this dies down. I’m thinking of taking some of the money I’ve made off that stupid song and endowing a scholarship at the Divine. In Baby Joe’s and Hasel’s names. Something for normal people, you know? For ordinary losers like you and me—”
I laughed and hugged her, trying my best to keep from crying. “I think that’s a great idea, Annie. Call me—”
“Oh, I will.” She hesitated at the door, shifted her knapsack from shoulder to shoulder. Finally she said, “Well. Bye, Dylan.”
Dylan smiled. “Bye, Annie.”
“Ciao, Sweeney.” And she was gone.
That left only Dylan and me.
“Will—will you be going back to school?” I asked softly, late that night. Dylan lay beside me in the heated darkness, his breathing so slow and measured I thought he had fallen asleep.
“No,” he said at last. He rolled over to look at me. “How can I go back there, after all this? I’m going to stay here. In D.C. And marry you, if it’s still okay.”
“Of course it’s okay,” I whispered, kissing him. “It’s the most okay thing in the world. But what will you do?”
“I have a trust fund that my father set up for me. If my—if Angelica ever shows up, well, I guess I’ll have to deal with her then.”
He was silent. Then he said, “I talked to Dr. Dvorkin this morning.”
“You did?” I was surprised and a little ashamed; I still hadn’t called or gone over to see him.
“He said that he could arrange for me to go to the Divine, if I wanted to. I could start in September, get my transcripts sent out from UCLA. He says I won’t have any trouble getting in—I’m a double legacy, whatever that is. I guess because of my mother and grandfather di Rienzi.”
I said nothing, thinking of Oliver and the hyacinth, now wilted upon the harvest table downstairs.
“So I thought, if it was all right with you, maybe I might do that. We’d still have a few weeks before the fall term starts.”
“And you won’t mind living with someone who’s older than most of your teachers?” I teased.
He shook his head. “No. Dr. Dvorkin said it’s nobody’s business, anyway—”
“Which it’s not.”
“—and he seems to think I’ll do really well there. He says I’m sort of the ideal student for them, whatever that is. He says they’ve waited a long time for someone like me to come along.”
“Oh, they have, Dylan,” I murmured, drawing him close to me. “And so have I.”
Coda
THERE IS A WOMAN in the moon. Dylan and I see her, night after night, her face growing closer to ours until it fills the window, huge and round and white, and we can hear her singing to us in Angelica’s voice. She has Angelica’s face as well, but bleached of all color. Angelica’s emerald eyes washed to grey, Angelica’s hair streaming from her face like clouds, Angelica’s hands the limbs of the willow tree tapping at the window. She is calling to us, she is waking us; she is willing us to follow her. Her hands reach through the window; the glass shatters as the moon engulfs our room and she is everywhere around us, the color of night, the color of milk, the color of bone.
We awaken in each other’s arms. We are in bed, Dylan and I, in the carriage house—the place that Robert Dvorkin, and the Benandanti, have given us. Outside the late-night traffic on Capitol Hill murmurs past. A lone taxi trawls for passengers, two college girls call drunkenly to each other on the distant avenue.
With a groan Dylan turns to look out the window. The moon is full. It no longer has his mother’s face, because he is awake now, and he remembers that his mother is gone. But something in the wind tapping at the glass reminds him of Angelica, I can tell, something in its low moaning makes him turn to hug me close to him, his arms tight around my stomach, his fingers moving restlessly, feeling what is there even though I have told him it is much too soon, it will be weeks, maybe months, before we will be able to feel the baby move.
But Dylan knows that she is there—his daughter, Oliver and Angelica’s child as much as his and mine—just as he knows that Othiym is there too, somewhere beyond the rim of the sky and the racing ledge of clouds, someplace where the sky runs black and stars stream down the bowl of heaven like blood in a cauldron.
She is there now. She will be there for the rest of our lives, and our daughter’s life, and perhaps beyond. That vast and dreaming form—sister, mother, daughter, wife—the eternal mystery, lover and destroyer. Othiym Lunarsa.
The woman in the moon.
Author’s Notes
IN THE COURSE OF writing this novel I referred often to the works of many people, chief among them Carlo Ginzburg (whose studies of the benign and very real benandanti inspired the fictional Benandanti), Paul Faure, Marija Gimbutas, Camille Paglia, Riane Eisler, Robert Graves, Anne Baring and Jules Cashford, Yves Bonnefoy, Rodney Castleden, Charles Pellegrino, Clifford Geertz, Patricia Monaghan, Carl Kerényi, Merlin Stone, Christos Doumas, Sir Arthur Evans, and Jane Harrison, as well as to numerous primary sources from the ancient world. Whenever possible, I have tried not to wander too far from what is currently known or speculated about the various goddess cults of Old Europe and the Mediterranean; an exception is in my use of the Linear A script from the Minoan/Mycenæan cultures, which, insofar as I am aware, continues to confound translators. However, this is a work of fiction, an entertainment and improvisation on some classical themes. As the classicist M. P. Nilsson wrote, “gods also have their history and are subject to change.” In no way should my pages be viewed as a critique, reflection, or interpretation of the works of those mentioned above. Any errors of fact contained herein are strictly my own.
Kudos to my wonderful agent, Martha Millard, for everything. Many thanks for all their help to my wonderful American and UK editors, Christopher Schelling and Jane Johnson; to Ellen Datlow, who read this manuscript in its nascent form; to Jennifer Hershey whose insight contributed invaluably to this work; and to Jose Padua, who since 1975 has been feeding my head with poetry and music.