Deadeye Dick Page 0,16

forgot her entirely. He got out of the car, but he didn’t go to Celia’s side, to open her door for her and offer his arm.

All alone, he walked to the center of the great new doorway, and he stopped there, and he put his hands on his hips, and he looked all around at the galaxy of tiny conflagrations.

He should have been angry, and he would get angry later. He would be like a dog with rabies later on. But, at that moment, he could only acknowledge that his father, after years of embarrassing enthusiasms and ornate irrelevancies, had produced an artistic masterpiece.

Never before had there been such beauty in Midland City.

• • •

And then Father stepped out from behind a vertical timber, the very one which had mashed his left foot so long ago. He was only a yard or two from Felix, and he held an apple in his hand. Celia could see him through the windshield of the Keedsler. He called out, with our house as an echo chamber, “Let Helen of Troy come forward—to claim this apple, if she dare!”

Celia stayed right where she was. She was petrified.

And Felix, having allowed things to go this far, was fool enough to think that maybe she could get out of the car and accept the apple, even though there was no way she could have any idea what was going on.

What did she know of Helen of Troy and apples? For that matter, what did Father know? He had the legend all garbled, as I now realize. Nobody ever gave Helen of Troy an apple—not as a prize, anyway.

It was the goddess Aphrodite who was given a golden apple in the legend—as a prize for being the most beautiful of all the goddesses. A young prince, named Paris, a mortal, chose her over the other two finalists in the contest— Athena and Hera.

So, as though it would have made the least bit of difference on that spring night in 1943, Father should have said, “Let Aphrodite come forward—to claim this apple, if she dare!”

It would have been better still, of course, if he had had himself bound and gagged in the gun room on the night of the senior prom.

As for Helen of Troy, and how she fitted into the legend, not that Celia Hildreth had ever heard of her: She was the most beautiful mortal woman on earth, and Aphrodite donated her to Paris in exchange for the apple.

There was just one trouble with Helen. She was already married to the king of Sparta, so that Paris, a Trojan, had to kidnap her.

Thus began the Trojan War.

• • •

So Celia got out of the car, all right, but she never went to get the apple. As Felix approached her, she tore off her corsage and she kicked off her high-heeled golden dancing shoes, bought, no doubt, like her white dress and maybe her underwear, at prodigious financial sacrifice. And fear and anger and stocking feet, and that magnificent face, made her as astonishing as anyone I have ever encountered in a legend from any culture.

Midland City had a goddess of discord all its own.

This was a goddess who could not dance, would not dance, and hated everybody at the high school. She would like to claw away her face, she told us, so that people would stop seeing things in it that had nothing to do with what she was like inside. She was ready to die at any time, she said, because what men and boys thought about her and tried to do to her made her so ashamed. One of the first things she was going to do when she got to heaven, she said, was to ask somebody what was written on her face and why had it been put there.

• • •

I reconstruct all the things that Celia said that night as Felix and I sit side by side here in Haiti, next to our swimming pool.

She said, we both remember, that black people were kinder and knew more about life than white people did. She hated the rich. She said that rich people ought to be shot for living the way we did, with a war going on.

And then, leaving her shoes and corsage behind her, she struck out on foot for home.

• • •

She only had about fourteen blocks to go. Felix went after her in the Keedsler, creeping along beside her, begging her to get in. But she ditched