did see. Trembling, I slipped my hand beneath the delicate spinal column.
She wore a plain golden ring on her finger
’Twas goodbye on the Isle of Capri
There. On the satin lining.
A plain golden ring, sucked off the hand of a dead man and trapped for forty years in the throat of the woman who loved him.
A plain golden ring.
It was the last verse of the song. The verse I couldn’t remember.
Until now.
And now I remembered everything. The pain and horror in Mother’s eyes, the pleading, the grasping fingers, the choking sound she made as she tried to speak….
It wasn’t horror in her eyes, but fear. Fear that even her own daughter would misunderstand the deaths that had come too soon. And now I knew what my mother had been trying to tell me that copper autumn afternoon so long ago. One word:
“Capri,” she had said. Capri….
But it wasn’t my name she whispered with those lush red lips. Not a beg for forgiveness, a plea for understanding. It was the name of the song: “The Isle of Capri.”
And then, standing there at my mother’s casket, I knew what it was she’d tried to tell me but couldn’t. Couldn’t—because a wedding ring engraved with the name of a murderess had lodged in her windpipe like a piece of candy and stolen her voice.
Forever Cassandra.
And that plain golden ring had never been found.
The police, and the courts, and the press, and the people, had all believed Mrs. Caiola. And why shouldn’t they? She was beautiful, an ice goddess sitting there in the witness stand in her black Christian Dior and veiled hat, wringing her gloved hands, with just the appropriate touch of widow’s wetness in her eyes.
Not the same set of gloves she’d had on when she shot first her husband, then his mistress, before spinning smartly on her high heels and click-click-clicking out of the kitchen. Always the perfect lady, that particular pair of gloves had been neatly disposed of. One, two, three. As easy as that. Ring-a-ding-ding.
Except the mistress hadn’t died quite so quickly as the husband. The mistress had time for one last kiss, a kiss that would name her murderess.
Forty years later.
Dabbing her eyes, careful not to smudge her mascara, Cassandra explained to the court that she and Joe had reconciled, that he’d gone to Lana Lake’s to tell her once and for all he wanted nothing more to do with her, that he was suing for custody of his daughter on the grounds that Lana was an unfit mother, and that Cassandra, awaiting his return, had heard the gunshots all the way across the garden. It was Cassandra who had called the police.
Everyone pitied the little girl sitting there in her black woolen uniform beside Sister Constance-Evangeline of Our Lady of Perpetual Sorrow. Capri Lake, the daughter of the whore, with her downcast eyes and burning cheeks and hands locked on her lap like a heart without a key.
And what a kind and generous woman was Cassandra Caiola to welcome into her own home, with open arms, the illegitimate child of her husband’s mistress.
It was how Joe would have wanted it, Mrs. Caiola explained. She had never been able to have children of her own. He would have wanted her to raise the child as her own flesh and blood to be a respectable and decent young lady. And everyone’s heads nodded in sympathetic agreement, and Cassandra smiled to herself, and in that moment, the course of my life changed forever.
Forever Cassandra.
A hand clad in an ice-white glove that smelled of Chanel No. 5 closed around a wrist braceleted with ruby tears. I was led numbly down the courtroom steps through a mill of people and reporters and photographers with flashbulbs. There was a controlled yet agonizing wrench of my arm socket as I ducked my head into the shining white Cadillac, and Cassandra Caiola drove us silently back to a house without dancing, without song, without love.
It took time to learn the music of silence.
It took my life.
But little by little, Cassandra Caiola became Mother to me. For I have always lived in the house without music.
God weeps no tears for dead whores, Capri. God weeps no tears.
Little by little, with Sister Constance-Evangeline’s compassionate guidance.
God weeps no tears, Capri. God weeps no tears.
And eventually I, too, wept no more. And Cassandra Caiola at last heard me whisper the word she wanted so desperately to hear—
one sweet word of love
And truly, there was no sweeter revenge for Cassandra Caiola