Belladonna Read online

  Belladonna sounds so sweet

  Pretty woman on the street

  Pretty woman passing by

  Pretty teardrops in her eye

  Pretty poison is her cry

  Belladonna watch you die

  A TASTY LITTLE DITTY

  Belladonna sounds so sweet

  A whiff of a killer is a potent aphrodisiac.

  Sweet sweet poison, they call her, the beauty fresh from hell.

  You want to breathe the same air she does, absorb the molecules of her fame as if a sniff could transform your dreary, sensible life. Don’t deny it. You know you’re desperate for the entire incredible fable of the incomparable Belladonna"not the fake stories multiplying like hyenas at a carcass, that greedy foraging for shards of gossip among the bones. So be patient. Sit back. Wish you were me, writing poisonously tasty little ditties, spreading a few rumors. All right, I concede: many rumors. I try not to lie, but sometimes I can’t help a tiny bit of exaggeration. Why should I spoil the unspooling of my story with the unadulterated truth?

  “I don’t want truth,” says Belladonna fiercely. “I’m not looking for truth. I want vengeance.“

  La vendetta. Oh ho, how your curiosity is piqued. Naughty, aren’t you? Naughty Belladonna sounds so sweet, but she’s not, is she? Never was, go the whispers.

  “Who wants nice?” she asks with a shrug. “Nice gets you nowhere.”

  But you don’t want her to be nice. Nice is boring. Nice is safe. Nice is not how she got her fortune. “Candy is dandy but lucre is cracker,” she says with a bitter laugh. “The power money buys is a woman’s only protection against the world. Against men. Against him.”

  That, and an unforgiving heart.

  I expect that many men possess her ruthlessness, but how many would be willing to pursue their passions into her vengeful realm? Do you consider vengeance an unsuitable topic for the women of the world? Too bad, then, for you. Finita la commedia.

  Allow me to introduce myself. Tomasino Cennini, your most obedient servant. Jack-of-all-trades, master of many. Because I once had the leisure to read the contents of an immense library I am a veritable fountain of arcane information; because I am possessed of such a pleasing personality I am an astute manager of many households; because I am such an officious listener I am a vast receptacle of buckets of gossip; because I am famous for my knee-throbbing hunches I am an uncanny judge of character. I am renowned for my mint juleps served in shiny silver beakers; notorious simply for my proximity to Belladonna.

  Don’t you forget it.

  I am also younger brother to Matteo Cennini, by four measly minutes. I suppose now is the time to tell you my twin and I are not quite all whole. Wholly male, I mean. We were born whole, naturally, but castration is not a topic for polite conversation. In fact, there is no easier way to watch a man’s face blanch than to whisper our piteous secret in his ear. Running more to fat than ever, I have been a eunuch so long that I no longer dream of the feel of a woman. But had we not been disfigured so, Belladonna would never have trusted us, and this story would be very different.

  Besides, I prefer not to think about my manhood. I have so many other wonderful qualities.

  “You are my masterpiece of ruined civilization,” Belladonna says fondly about me. I am indispensable to her, a man of consummate style and judgment, a delicious comrade for any emergency.

  How I love my work!

  I came to meet Belladonna when she was nearing the end of the worst of what made her, you see, when Matteo and I were…

  Botheration. It is too soon to tell you of that treachery, yet surely the purpose of every story is to arrive at a destination.

  Let me start again: This is a story of revenge.

  Pretty woman on the street

  Close your eyes and let me conjure a woman of cruelty sublime. You adore her and despise her: The humble are filled with disapproving envy; the wealthy with scornful, grudging admiration"yet still you long to join her world as if to steal the secret of her being and make it your own.

  I know you wonder if she has a heart. It doesn’t matter, though, because she has enough money to buy one, or anything else she wants.

  See her sit, unblinking, cold as frost, yet when she points her fan at you, or talks about everything and nothing in her throaty voice, or smiles, life for a moment seems to go that much faster. And when she laughs"oh ho, Belladonna, the very sound of it so intoxicating it could enchant the deaf"you wish you could bottle this sound, genie-like, to uncork and replay whenever you realize that the world without Belladonna is a world without enchantment.

  She is not quite real, this magical image come to life in the dark corners of the Club Belladonna

  “What is real? What is useful?” Belladonna asks one night as she moves among the tables, fingering a bright cerise ringlet of her wig. “What is more boring than a useful person? Flowers are useless, but we love them, we nurture them, we can’t live without them. So don’t talk to me of useful unless you understand the kind of usefulness I need.”

  Which, of course, no one understands. Except me.

  People believe almost anything about Belladonna. That, for instance, she uses dilute drops of Atropa belladonna to enlarge her pupils and make them gleam. No no no"it is a glimmer of disdain and vague amusement, tempered by her preclub ritual: a glass of watercress juice and a diluted vinegar chaser to start the blood flowing.

  Her otherworldly eyes and hint of a smile under her masks petrify your imagination, and render you nearly dumb like my brother Matteo, the silent sentinel at the club’s door, with the dog Andromeda at his side. Belladonna’s devastating beauty"or rather, what you imagine it to be"is of such power as to arouse even the impotent.

  And I should know, shouldn’t I?

  Pretty woman passing by

  Ask yourself this: What is concealed behind that glorious facade of the impenetrable Belladonna? She may appear to be a woman of beguiling ease, but how easily she can seduce your senses into confused bewilderment. She’s had too many years to perfect this talent. It started, quite unwillingly, under a very particular kind of tutelage. It continued under another, where she learned how to play at concealment like a game. One of the few she could win.

  Yet I warn you, she has an uncanny radar for deceit; lie to her and she’ll turn that green gaze upon you, freezing the marrow of your bones. In her club she knows all the secrets. And the truth is, you never had a clue what Belladonna looks like, really. I’ll tell you this much: If you see her walking down the street, you’ll say, “Now there is a fine figure of a woman.” Her hair is long and thick and very wavy, a lustrous dark reddish chestnut, with hints of gold running through it; the firmly shaped planes of her face are slightly tilted; her lips like chewy cherries; her chin strong, like her nose; her neck long and lovely; her body of only medium height, curvy and strong, held ramrod-straight so that she seems taller. Her movements are impossibly quick; she is agile like a puma, lithe and fastidious.

  Blink and you’ll miss her. No, Belladonna doesn’t trust anyone. Why should she? I wouldn’t, if I were Belladonna.

  Pretty teardrops in her eye

  The absurd juxtapositions life presents: One moment you pick up the telephone and overhear your husband telling his mistress how much he desires her, and the next you’re looking at toothpaste in your bathroom, spit into a marble sink as turquoise as the tiles of a pool glistening in the gardens underneath the tower window of a Tuscan palazzo.

  Women started flocking to the imperious Belladonna in desperation, you see. They decided she might be a sympathetic ally, and they began to write pleading letters. In the early years of the 1950s, we lived in a twilight world of unjust verdicts; courtrooms were ruled by fools, by men, where new money and old connections bought freedom for th
e guilty willing to pay any price.

  But Belladonna has more than enough money to buy them all. And now all those women have Belladonna.

  Pretty poison is her cry

  See what she has become: the octopus of revenge. How these women plead, hoping to be admitted to her secret lair in the Club Belladonna.

  For them, she is a modern-day oracle of vengeance. Her voice, they say, is low and sweet, and when they tell her what they want she lights the fire and burns the incense, her calm movements evoking a primitive eeriness. She makes these ladies repeat their desires, and it is then that her voice changes, only for the briefest of seconds, into a shape as brittle as the mahogany skin of a roasted suckling pig dug steaming out of a pit of glowing coals.

  Oh ho, a whiff of Belladonna is wafting their way.

  So much in so few words! I didn’t say Belladonna is nice, did I?

  She prefers the Atropa belladonna, of course. Deadly nightshade, lovely purplish-red flowers shaped like bells, berries black and shiny as a cocker spaniel’s coat.

  I prefer Nerium oleander. So delicate, fragrant, and touchable, so bitterly toxic. It’s not from the dogbane family for nothing. Brush that glossy coat of pretty poochie all you want before he laps the pond water where a few sweet leaves and branches of oleander float, innocently rotting. Kiss pretty poochie good-bye.

  Belladonna watch you die

  There she sits in her secret lair, the toughness of her shell invulnerable to criticism and jealousy. A deliberate cipher, since no one can see her face. Yet the fire burns inside her, propelling her on.

  She changes all those other women profoundly, but for her they are a mere diversion, a crochet hook and yarn to keep her hands busy while her mind frets in its quest for the men who wronged her.

  The members of the Club, she calls these men. Not the Club Belladonna. The other one.

  And the worst of them is known as His Lordship.

  Yes, the women in the Club Belladonna are only a small part of my story. But like everyone else who meets Belladonna, they long for acknowledgment, the smallest token of her love and esteem.

  Don’t hold your breath waiting.

  It’s not that my darling Belladonna is immune to love, even if the landscape of her heart is full of hardness and chill. She lives to plot, you see. The plotting, like the fire of her rage, will not leave her. She will reshape her world; she will remold herself; she will create her own destiny. How she suffered"but she will not let fate squash her down and kill her spirit.

  “You can become anything"if only you know what you want, which most people don’t,” she was told. “If you think you can’t fail, you won’t. If you think you’re going to lose, you will. If you avoid the truth, you pay for your lies. A lie will always do the most harm to the person who tells it.”

  That, she learned too well. But at the bottom of every conquest is a little worm, snaking in the dirt, looking to feed itself. A little worm, a little bit of poison to spoil your fun and cut a jagged edge in your hopefulness.

  It keeps her ever vigilant, and she knows how to protect herself. We were introduced to a man who taught us the best way to shoot: Stand in a perpendicular stance to expose less of your body, take a deep breath, exhale halfway, swallow, then squeeze"never pull"the trigger before your target knows what hit him. Shoot steady.

  Aim for his heart.

  Belladonna sounds so sweet

  Are you still with me? Of course you are. I know where you want to go, but you haven’t yet earned the right to cross the exclusive portals of the Club Belladonna. It’s time to go back, years and years, to the beginning of what molded her.

  It was 1935, early spring in London, the trees just beginning to bud, and she was only eighteen and knew so little of the world. She was visiting her cousin June, free at last from the boring burden of her upbringing. Life was a pleasingly empty road of vague dreams and girlish hopes stretching before her in the mist of a March twilight. It was then mat she had the misfortune to meet a man named Henry Hogarth. At least that’s what he said his name was.

  Henry Hogarth. How the sound of his name conjures a flood of memories. How the thought of him and what he started leads me to this tale of the incomparable Belladonna.

  Oh ho, the sweet sweet poison!

  The Diary

  (1935)

  LONDON, MARCH–MAY 1935

  "All women are whores, Hogarth was saying. He’d come to their little flat for tea.

  June’s eyes got as round as the saucer of milk they put out for the cat, when she heard that. Her cousin, sitting in a corner of the flat, looked up from her book.

  "Henry Hogarth, June said, giggling, you are too shocking. You say the most unbelievable things.

  "But it’s true, my dear June, he said, whorish behavior begins when a little girl bats her eyelashes at daddy. He becomes putty in his wee darling’s hands, does he not? The more affectionate she is, the more loving he becomes. Aha, she says to herself. This is progress; this brings me presents. Then she begins to work her way through the other masculine members of the family. As putty, they become as well. And so it goes, on and on from there until she hooks them all.

  "But what has that to do with whores? June’s cousin asked.

  Hogarth flicked off an infinitesimal speck of lint from his jacket. He was fussy about his clothes. He was always complaining about his tailor. Then he smiled.

  "It has everything to do with whores, he said. Girls learn that flaunting a few of the feminine wiles may very well bestow upon them what they think they desire. A husband, a house, whatever. They are willing to sell themselves in exchange for security. And this they’ve learned at darling daddy’s knee.

  "I didn’t learn that from my father, her cousin said.

  "Your father was a drunk, June said. She didn’t understand this conversation, which meant she didn’t like it. It had nothing to do with her.

  "Women are afraid of their own desires, Hogarth went on. They’re simply too overwhelming. Sexual desires, I mean. Therefore, they sell themselves short; they sell the possibility of their freedom for the allures of security. He shuddered. Quite a dreadful concept, if you ask me.

  "Is that why you’re not married? June’s cousin asked.

  "One of the many reasons, he replied. Always on the move. Must remain unencumbered. “A man has missed something if he has never woken up in an anonymous bed beside a face he’ll never see again, and if he has never left a brothel at dawn feeling like jumping off a bridge into the river out of sheer physical disgust with life.” Flaubert, of course.

  Hogarth was always quoting things. Especially quotes from Frenchmen. That made June impatient. She didn’t know who Flaubert was or what Hogarth was talking about.

  "Had I indeed taken the fateful plunge toward the matrimonial state, Hogarth went on, I should never have had the pleasure of meeting the delicious June Nickerson.

  "Oh Hogarth, June said. You say the nicest things.

  "I don’t think what you’ve been saying about women is nice at all, said her cousin.

  "No, I don’t suppose it is, Hogarth replied. You shall learn that sometimes, my sweet, nice gets you nowhere. Nor does conventionality. Or conformity.

  June’s cousin had the feeling he was talking directly to her, testing her in some odd way, bypassing June because he knew she was too feeble to understand.

  "What would you do, for example, if you had a chance, if something remarkable and splendid could be handed to you if only you dared reach out to grab it? Hogarth asked, looking directly at her. A chance to change your life, utterly. All you’d have to do would be to agree to take one step into the shadows.

  She felt a chill. A premonition. Don’t be absurd, she told herself. It’s just talk. Hogarth talking to two impressionable American girls pretending to be sophisticated in his London world.

  "I’d grab it, June said. Of course I’d grab it.

  "Yes, my dear June, I always knew you were a brave darling, Hogarth said. And you?

&nbs
p; "Oh, she doesn’t know what she wants, June protested. You won’t ever get a straight answer out of her.

  Hogarth knew her answer, she decided. He gave a tiny nod only she could see. And he didn’t like June at all. The sudden realization struck her like an afternoon downpour in Kensington Gardens. He tolerated June because he was interested in her. She didn’t like him like that; nor was he interested in seducing her. It was something else. She had no idea what. She ‘d never met anyone like him before in all her young years. But the knowledge that she intrigued a man like Hogarth pleased her very much.

  "A touch of the forbidden sharpens one’s focus, Hogarth said

  June frowned Honestly, the most ridiculous things sometimes came out of Hogarth’s mouth.

  "Yes, a touch of the forbidden, he went on. My round-about manner, dearest June, of inviting you to a very exclusive costume ball. A house party in the country. It will be the most splendid event of the season.

  "Oh, what fun! June said. London’s been such a bore. It’s always raining and gray and damp and so boring. Ever since I got here; ever since she got here last month. But does she have to come with us? Look at her, always got her nose buried in some dumb book. So boring.

  "Of course your cousin must come, Hogarth said. We couldn’t think of going without her. Those lovely green eyes will dazzle everyone there.

  June really didn’t like hearing that. She pouted. June had a tendency to pout, when she wasn’t complaining. But she needed her cousin with her in London, even though June didn’t think she was showing enough gratitude. More opportunity to go out, meet people, when she had another girl her age with her. People like Hogarth were much more interesting than dusty old statues and boring old things in museums. Who would you ever meet in a museum besides boring old tourists?

  Her cousin should be grateful that June had already met Hogarth at a dinner party a few weeks before. Hogarth knew everybody and got invited to everything. Hogarth took June and her cousin to the most fabulous places, tea at the Cafe Royal and dinners at the Gargoyle and the 400 and the Ivy, where everyone looked at them, because they were jealous. Swanky parties in mansions full of servants and lots of young people, interesting people who were wearing fabulous clothes, women in silken gowns with fluttery chiffon sleeves. And the jewelry, huge things that left June speechless with desire. People didn’t wear jewels like that in Minneapolis. Ropes of pearls. Chunks of emeralds and sapphires, and oh, those diamond tiaras. June wanted a tiara. More than anything, June wanted a husband who was rich enough to buy her a tiara.