Chapter One

O fairest of creation!  last and best
Of all God's works!  creature in whom excell'd
Whatever can to sight or thought be form'd,
Holy, divine, good, amiable, or sweet!
How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost,
Defac'd, deflower'd, and now to Death devote?

--Paradise Lost IX, 891-6

Nobody ever had any reason to expect that Cass would one day wind up supporting an unreconstructed slug and his various appetites and hangers on in a two-room apartment in Los Angeles. Entering adolescence, she was quite a surprisingly slender beauty, and everybody in the family assumed she was destined to be a starlet or a fashion model.

Then the Edwines all moved to Europe for a while, and it seemed as though she might marry into the military, to one or another of the Air Force officers she was seeing, all of them black.

At this time, interracial marriages were only just beginning to lose some of their veneer of liberal feasibility. Those Sidney Poitier movies were winding their way down through outdoor movies to late-night television. People from clean, prosperous, sparsely-populated Intermountain Western backwater university communities were still saying (though with gradually waning conviction), "Well, you know, if two people really love one another--"

Actually, it was the military part that bothered everybody to the point of precipitating a family crisis. Meanwhile, Cassie made love to many black men.

She was almost eighteen and had just reached her full six feet in a sudden, late spurt of vertical growth. A prissy doctor back in Utah had wanted to induce early puberty in Cassie, shoot her with lady hormones to make her wind up shorter. But her dad and she had said bullshit to that, and Cassie had finally finished puberty a little late, as if to spite the prissy doctor.

So, at seventeen, in Germany, she had the newly arrived, stretchy figure of a haute couture model, which placed her in great demand at the General von Steuben Bachelor Officers' Quarters and elsewhere in the American military community. (Or "ghetto," as her mom would say.)

The deutsche mark was still just twenty-five cents at that time, before the partial withdrawal of the occupying American troops and the brass who chaperoned them. So life at the BOQ was still moderately swank. Wiesbaden, where her dad was teaching business administration to the Air Force men, had more millionaires per square foot than any place outside of Arabia. ("They're nothing but a gang of old Nazis sitting on Jewish fortunes that they appropriated for the Thousand Year Reich," explained Cass's mom.)

So there were many fine places to go, and the black Air Force officers could afford to dazzle Cass with real rock crystal set on tables or hanging from high ceilings; dishes of baby veal, thin and white as paper; and real string quartets playing Johann Strauss and sometimes even better music. And Cass loved the Weiss Wein, as much to say it as to drink it cold in quantities, to swirl the shrill nerve-grating notes of the wine glasses while her black officers watched and pretended to be irritated and smiled with their sharply sculpted cheek bones.

Cassie lost her cherry to a captain on a Taunus hill which rose symmetrically up from the wealthy suburbs of Wiesbaden. At her feet were the Aquae Mattiacorum, the ancient Roman hot springs, and millionaires' mansions with coppiced backyards below. She was smoothed out on a blue blanket among woods which surrounded a little jewel of a Russian Orthodox chapel, onion domes of gold up in the grey sky. Prince Somebody built it for his dead wife, or something like that.

When she got tired of sucking in her cheeks and being mature, Cassie spent time on the air base with the enlisted black men and the noncoms. They took her to Soul Night at the discotheque in the grey cinder-block basement of the airmen's club. Here she savored American evening culture as she'd never been allowed to do back Stateside.

Since she saw racier crowds than hers in this disco taking LSD and smoking marijuana by strobe light, Cass thought it okay to let herself get brave. She drank canteensful of the secret "psycho punch" that her particular friends concocted. The active ingredient was boiled-down Contac capsules. It just made her scalp tingle, and made her dad ask if she was sleepy when she got home.

Cass especially liked her little blue-black airmen, her fruit fly-shiny boys from the levee camps of the Mississippi delta. Their thick-lipped accents sounded so much like baby talk, lisping and innocently inflected, when they said things like "One li'l ole nut," and "That makes me see Ralf," and "Turn 'em upside down, they all looks the same," and "If you'd keep her off the streets she wouldn't git fucked." They'd say that last one when someone called them motherfucker, which was about every ten minutes.

After a while, Cass decided it was a clever retort, really: an example (as her mom might say) of the natural sort of rough-hewn wit that uneducated people could conjure up as a means of self-defense in a sophisticated and alien land. Pretty funny, if you steeled yourself.

Cassie found it exciting to be intellectually removed from the rest of humanity sometimes, to put on an attitude like her mom's. It was fun to stand back and ogle her lovers through her brain's eye like schematic diagrams of electronic components, perhaps to gauge their various levels of intelligence by scrutinizing their reading materials.

All of the letters and medical columns in the black men's nasty magazines spoke of the immaturity of the clitoral orgasm, and suggested that most young girls feel their most intense sensations in the labia and clitoris. But Cass liked mostly to be full, and to be manipulated deep inside, clear up to where she imagined her cervix to be. And penis size did matter: hard and fat and long and black-hot; slippery and vulgar as a boiled egg inside.

She read about it between sessions of having it done to her. And, in this one respect, she preferred the enlisted men to the officers: the noncoms and airmen had only simple nasty porno to read, while the officers had depressing books like Freud in addition to dirty magazines. And, being her mom's daughter, Cassie always felt obliged to read the most edifying sex stuff available, of course. She read Freud in much the same way as one runs one's finger over a freshly popped blister: in short, jabbing, foray-like motions, irresistibly drawn to it by the fascination of the pain it caused, and grateful for any distraction (like more loving) from such morbidity.

Books of old-fashioned psychology reminded Cass of certain century-old Scandinavian plays that she'd borrowed off her mom's shelves and nightstands. And the memory of these plays, in turn, set her mind to mulling, not altogether sarcastically, over the possibility that her own weirdly tall, nuclear-mutant Utahn family might be of the typical cursed or inbred Ibsenian variety: "Then X must have made love to Y and passed it on to--but no, Y couldn't've been born yet," etc., until she made herself laugh, and her black lover of the moment asked, "What's so funny?" and rought her back to a real life that she could feel and smell and taste. Something all naked and warm.

The reason was twofold why Cassie was allowed to be so promiscuous with her intellect and person in Germany: Mom was absent and Dad was--well, Dad was just his same old Saint Francis of Assisi-like self.  Mom was always off touring the rest of Europe with young Sammy, teaching him the history of Western civilization first hand. Together the two of them comprised the teutonophobic branch of the family. They were conscientious about getting away from the Teutons whenever possible. That's the word they used, spitting it out in a deep guttural voice, "Toooo-tons," to show what gross beasts they thought the Germans were.

But, no matter how hard they tried, Mom and Sammy never could convince Cassie that Wiesbaden wasn't the enchanted land of Oz, with its long rows of elaborately carved rock houses shooting up high and serious and grey as ancient organ pipes from the downtown cobblestones. And its streets teeming with U.S. Air Force men.

She even remained obdurate when Mom tantalized her with a picture book about Greece and the sunny Aegean. Cass said, Sorry, but she knew from experience that she sunburned easily. Besides, Daddy needed company. Should we leave him all alone in that old BOQ when he's the one financing this whole operation? Like a good daughter, Cassie elected to stay at home, in Germany.

However, early on in their European sojourn, before Cass had gotten into the full swing of Air Force night life, she allowed herself to be roped into going on one terribly strange tour.

* * * *

"In Italy we'll find no city like Wiesbaden that's reserved just for thieving war criminals," said Mom. "That's because most of the Italian people were too lovely and sunny-dispositioned to swallow the second-hand anti-Semitism that Mussolini tried to shove down their throats."

That's one of the many things Cass's mom said on the plane. Mom's function on these tours was to lecture and explain everything, to provide a running commentary, correct pronunciations and other glosses for the tour guides' usually inadequate lectures. She knew absolutely everything there was to know about the cultural history of the whole universe. And, in certain moods, she seemed to have limitless energy for talking and walking and harking back and propounding for hours at a time non-stop.

But, at irregular intervals with her children in Italy, Mom's speaking mechanism seemed temporarily to break down, and she'd follow along behind the tour groups as tractably as any of the other middle-aged American wives. More elegant and aristocratically beautiful than the others, of course, with finer, sharper features and flashier dark eyes, but equally docile.

Strange to say, it was what Cass saw during her mom's quiet depressive times that would later stick the most firmly in her mind. It was as if, when not being importuned to appreciate, Cass's senses operated more efficiently.

For example, there was the wander through the Vatican, when the cicerone was smugly trying to impress the bigger-is-better Americans by pointing out the marks on the floor of St. Peter's which showed where the other great churches of the world would land if rattled around inside this hugest of basilicas. Mom was strangely paying close attention to the floor, for she was in one of her not-all-there moods.

Cass noticed something through the corner of her right eye, something going on against the far wall. She turned and squinted through the gloomy distance and saw her brother stagger and fall flat on his ass, slack-jawed and bug-eyed, before Michelangelo's Pieta. This was long before a young Roman bohemian acquaintance of theirs was to mistake it for a pinata. At that time the statue was in no glass cage, but accessible, merely surrounded by a low velvet rope corral; and every contour of that naked, doomed chunk of marble would stay forever in Cass's memory, with Sammy flattened out before it.

Or else there was the visit to the Sistine, where Sammy flung himself flat on his back on the floor once again, but Cassie didn't even glance up because she didn't want to look like tourist by craning her neck—also because she was watching her mom rock back and forth almost imperceptibly on a bench.

Or else there was that other fancy building in Firenze or Milano or someplace, where Mom spent exactly one hour silently demonstrating to Sammy how the great Horned Moses' marble toes had been eroded away by six centuries' worth of devout fingers.

Or else the little cart down inside the Forum where Cass led her silent mom to buy fresh-squeezed orange juice that was burning bright red, and Mom guzzled it like tap water.

Or else the side jaunt to Pompeii and its glass cases full of plaster casts of volcanic corpses (genitals prudishly chiselled down or filled in), and the ancient wall painting of a demi-god with a giant, milky-red cock. But Cass and Mom didn't get to see it because only the men were allowed to stay in the excavated villa when the metal strongbox built around the picture was unlocked. Sammy described the art to Mom at the top of his lungs, hoping to get a rise out of her, and failing.

And always the sun blazing and making Cass frown. She longed for the Rhineland where the sun, when it came out, was like a momentary forced smile. Everything un-German she saw would later only come back to her in perfunctory single scenes, more revealing of what was on her teenaged mind at the time than of what the reality of the place must have been--just sense impressions that in some illogical way reminded her of her Negroes.

* * * *

With Mom absent so much of the time Cass had essentially total freedom to live as she pleased in the BOQ, for Daddy presented no obstacle. He was busy doing various man's things.

He was drinking just the tiniest bit--and who could blame him, with all the superb beers and wines available, and especially the schnapps, made from apples and pears, that went down smooth as glass. He was also gambling a small fraction of the time. Mostly just enjoying an occasional evening in the opulence of Wiesbaden's great stone castle Spielbank, where Dostoevski himself had raved.

It was also possible that Dad--still very handsome in his rough way, with his powerful horse nostrils and scarred jaw--was busy adulterizing just a smidgen. There was a very fine secretary at the Education office, a Canadian woman sensuous in that solid middle-aged way that appeals so strongly to mature men.

In addition, Dad was busy with teaching and textbook writing, and also composing long, descriptive Continental letters to his brothers and sisters. Work and family were his first concerns in life.

But mostly Cass's dad was just an Idahoan: a Freeley, Idahoan through and through, first and foremost. And this meant that no matter how sophisticated or worldly he got (and he was internationally known in his field), by temperament he would forever be incapable of seeing anything unpleasant or corrupt in the immediate world. At least not until it came up and bit his ass.

He never could see anything too terribly carnal in either of his children, whom he cherished still as pure babies. In his goodness, Dad just assumed that the EMs and the noncoms were taking Cassie on gentle dates to Walt Disney movies, followed by a soda at the PX and a little smooching or feeling around afterwards. What else could he think? His girl was only seventeen. He just assumed those soldiers were civilized, like anybody else. 

Dad had lived out the Great Depression on a little potato farm, and therefore knew nothing of the starving animal degradation that, say, Mom had seen as a girl in the slums and ghettoes of Washington, D.C. Back in Freeley, when he was young and forming his lifelong racial attitudes, the only Negro he'd ever seen had been a soft-spoken Uncle Tom who passed through with a traveling boxing show. (Dad got the reach on him and creamed him and won the prize.)

Dad had never enjoyed much previous experience with soldiers, either. He'd originally been designated 4-F because of his height. And when, in a patriotic fervor inspired by being called a coward by one too many barrooms full of old World War One vets, he'd finally scraped up enough dough to pay for his own specially made giant boots and uniform, he'd been whisked straight from a boot camp full of other farm babies to a POW camp in Japan. And that was pure nightmare. It bore no relation to his waking conception of the military man.

So it was not surprising that he would assume that Cassie's black men, especially the officers, were gentlemen like himself, just lending a fatherly hand in introducing her to Continental life. Many of her officers were his own students, and even drank with him after class. They looked him in the eye, didn't they? She surely must've been copulating with just one officer, or one at a time at the most, he thought.

When the shit finally hit the fan (as one of Cass' beaux put it), it was not so much a question of how Dad found out, as of who proved it to him—who presented him with something incontrovertible and bashed his head with it till he noticed? Who would've wanted to go to all that trouble, to hurt him that badly?

Only the white officers, the ones with waxed butch haircuts, were loutish enough to gossip about such things. But they were mostly animals, and therefore primitive enough to be unquestioningly intimidated by Dad's seven feet of height. Their gossip must have gone on at a respectful distance behind his broad back. The very few officers who were sharp enough to perceive their professor's thoroughgoing gentleness were far too subtle in their bitchy allusions to Cassie's whoring for Dad to take heed.

He was not obtuse; but he was exclusively caught up in his own life, in urgently transmitting to his students the subtleties of his statistical craft, or in calculating the odds of a seven-card stud hand. (He preferred good old cigar-farting USA-style card parties to the suave Spielbank. Whiskey-fueled poker was the only context in which any type of cosmic order--Holy Probability--manifested itself to the giant atheist.)

Now, the only man in all of Europe who was close enough to Dad to be able to speak frankly with him was the asshole limey desk clerk. Dad felt affinities with Monty, for he was from a small agricultural community, too, one of those claustrophobic towns in northern England whose only access is an eight-foot-wide road snaking in among the cold jungle of deciduous trees. Monty didn't see it as quite so provincial as all that: he always bragged that his hometown church had real Chagall windows. But Cass never believed him, and secretly called him a liar.

Dad called Monty "fellow country boy," and ignored the rumors that he'd been run mysteriously out of the UK after the war. Because he seemed so "serene and philosophical," Dad called him Buddha, and spent whole evenings standing at the General von Steuben BOQ's front desk swapping war tales with him. Monty was about six and a half feet tall and could nearly see eye to eye with Dad.

So, the Englishman certainly had the means and the opportunity--and, unfortunately, one of Cass's airmen saw to it that he also had a motive for finking on her.

Cassie was up in her room on the eighth floor one afternoon, trying to cheer up a homesick boy named Looie. (That's how his parents had spelled it on his birth certificate. He also had two separate, discrete sisters officially named Jenyfer and Jeny.) Looie, a sweet sensitive thing with huge yellow and red eyes, was pining away for his home in Brownsville, Tennessee, so far away across the ocean. He was suffering from that familiar delayed-reaction culture shock that manifests itself in temporary attacks of mild paranoia. He'd been shedding tears and looking intensely out over the misty grey city and speculating as to what awful things he'd do if he ever heard a single word of "foreign talkin" again. Looie just needed to talk intimate American with somebody for a while, that's all. They both had most of their clothes on.

Eventually, through a certain motherly art--"That selfless art which is second nature to many females, and so pleasurable to them in its application, combining commiseration with fawning encouragement and just a touch of gently chiding reproof" (she read than in an old sexist Russian novel somewhere, or else she just made it up)--eventually, Cassie got her boy fortified, enough so that he felt up to making a foray upon the Toto Lotto store for some candy or white wine or something. His eyes were still a bit damp, childish and large, suspiciously darting, and he was trembling a bit. But with a six-foot-tall white girl on his arm, Looie was able to regain a good portion of his strutty, jive-ass composure as they rode down to the lobby.

Monty was stationed down there behind his desk as usual, his bug eyes hanging out over his pasty cheeks and alcoholic's nose. He was like a leering, overgrown Dylan Thomas. Monty affected that same upper-class "cut-glass" British accent that sounds like a mouthful of gallstones.

Now, Monty did not exactly enjoy the most pleasant of working environments, surrounded as he was by ugly examples of Oberammergauer wood sculpture and pseudo-Parisian abstract expressionism, slickly reflecting the greyness from the light well. This level of lobby art served admirably to captivate bird-colonels' wives but was definitely no good as a steady way of life. For this reason the Englishman tended either to blind drunk on the job or else totally submerged in some novel or other. He was used to sending young Sammy out for beer or Daphne du Maurier, who could be had at the base library along with early Graham Greene and nothing else.

This afternoon Monty must have been having one of his blind drunk days, must've been thinking in blurry conceptual chunks and reacting to those chunks rather than to what his mercifully dulled senses perceived. Seeing the concept of Cass approaching with a shadowy male person, he assumed that it was Sammy, and cried out, "Say, run on down to the pub 'n get me a pint! There's a good boy!"

Looie tightened up. Cass could feel it in his arm. As they walked past the desk, he gave the big Englishman the coldest of glares, saying nothing. But this huge-eyed glare must have been eloquent enough. Monty immediately forgot about the errand.

Evidently an unspoken male challenge had been tossed out, the kind of thing Cassie would never understand; for Monty swelled himself up to his full stature and blurted, "I drink nigger's blood!" Immediately he looked surprised at himself, then sorry, after seeing Cassie's jaw drop open.

Looie disengaged his arm from hers.

In a sputter, all chagrined and apologetic, Monty began to explain, "You see, ha-ha. Nigger's blood, that's what we call brandy in the UK--"

"Uk" is how that last word came out, because Looie was all at once hanging from Monty's throat, his short body stretched across the desk.

"I drink--white man's blood!" he shouted, too gentle even in his rage to say "ofay" or "honkie" or "chuck" or whatever the current term was. Monty coughed and, with evident disgust, swatted the airman away. Cass led him out the door.

Hesitating outside on the sidewalk, Looie said. "You know what color my first car was?"

"What?" asked Cass, knowing the answer.

"Black," said Looie. And he repeated the word with a small sigh. "Black."

So, when Dad one day suggested, gently but firmly, that she take a job as assistant registrar in the Education Center at $1.80 per hour (never a hint of flat accusation, but an unveiled command that she hurry up and get herself licitly occupied before Mom got home from the latest tour), Cass had her prime suspicions as to the identity of the informant.

She never could be certain that Dad knew anything at all. She always cherished a very small hope that she was just imagining an apparent decrease in the velocity of her daddy's festive Continental life, and an increase in the amount of time that his solitary snoring could be heard echoing up the hall from his room, as he slept away large portions of the remainder of his first and probably last visit to the enchanted land of Germany.