“So will I,” replied Victoria.
“I will marry first, though. My husband and I will live in a two-story house with a grand salon and a piano.”
“We’ll have to be good,” Victoria reminded her sister one last time before they knocked the door.
“Of course.”
“Amenable,” Victoria adjusted her skirt. “Courteous—” she pinched her and her sister’s cheeks to make them look healthier. “And well mannered.”
“We’ll be so happy!”
“Happier that we ever were at the beach.”
“Happier than we would have ever been doing witchcraft.”
They had done one last thing before they left Venice that afternoon, their little sister found out when she entered to clean their bedroom: They had gotten rid of all their magic supplies: the dolls, the rusty knives, the books of incantations. Everything was gone. Everything the young girl had hoped to inherit. She ran downstairs to search in the mother’s closet. All of her notes, all of her potions, they had left nothing behind but a few worthless items.
“Welcome!” Harris hollered from the second floor window. “Welcome to Los Angeles,” he repeated one minute later, opening the downstairs door and lifting up both girls at the same time.
My, Harris was handsome! A well trimmed beard, a curled mustache, and just the right amount of hair coming out from his chest and arms to make a lady tremble, victim of her own lustful imagination.
He put the girls down and kissed both of them twice on the cheeks. He had the manners of a French gentleman and the build of an Irish boxer.
Magnolia came down, too. A comely face, but plain in comparison. She kissed the girls and then her husband, who immediately repaid her with another kiss. Victoria let out a few tears.
The apartment was smaller than the girls remembered it, but quite comfortable and equipped with all sorts of modern appliances: electricity and central heating, hot and cold running water; even a telephone line.
Magnolia showed the girls to their room. Small, too, and they would have to share a bed, but it had a magnificent view of downtown and the river.
“How do you like it?” Harris asked.
“It is beautiful!” the girls cried at once.
“We are so thankful!”
“We are not used to such kindness.”
“Our parents always gave the best things to our little sister. For us, there were only beatings.”
After supper the four of them went for an ice cream, and then for a long stroll downtown. It was a warm night, perfumed—how appropriately!—by the monkshoods and the sweet magnolias in the park. There were many good-looking families outside, but theirs, the girls decided, was the happiest and the best looking. Especially because of Harris. He drew everyone’s attention, but he only had eyes for his wife, and Magnolia had eyes for no one else but her husband. They called each other ridiculous names: My Dove, My Angel, and every time their eyes met, they winked at each other or blew a kiss.
“Pay attention, for this is what true love looks like,” Victoria said to her sister. “We need to find each other a husband. One just like Harris.”
Rosa opened her mouth to remind her sister that they were already married—to the Devil; but then she remembered that they had agreed not to ever talk about that, so she remained silent.
“We need to pray,” Victoria continued, guessing what her sister had left unsaid. “Every day. And to be good. So we can be forgiven.”
In Venice, their youngest sister sought refuge in prayer, too. What else could she have done? She knew well that she was evil, her mother had never let her believe otherwise. The gates of Heaven wouldn’t open for her, especially not after what she had done to her poor mother’s curtains, unless she repented. Those curtains were not the type you want your children to play with, not with their chubby, greasy, messy fingers. Burning inside a pit of pitch for all eternity sounded worse than what she had already endured during her first decade on this Earth, although she was no more afraid of the goat coming back for her than, say, her putative father coming home behind the cork every evening. Thankfully, he was getting older, and the older he got, the weaker, and the less abusive.
She went to church every Sunday, and continued working at the freak show, folding her small body inside a box, pretending to be a human spider. The drunkard never got a job, and with her mother and sisters gone, the young girl became the household’s sole provider.
She didn’t do too badly. Tourists felt pity for her and left as many tips in her box as for the sword swallower. However, she couldn’t save much of what she earned, for she had to send a monthly stipend to her two sisters. It would be quite unfair for poor Harris to have to take care of all our expenses, Rosa wrote her. Hence, insofar as money, there was never too much, just enough for some bread and coffee, sometimes sugar, and for her father’s medicine: a bottle of the strongest liquor.
One afternoon, a year or so after the mother’s passing, the young girl was in the kitchen washing dishes while the man she called father napped in the living room when she heard someone knocking on the front door. She crossed the room to open the door but found no one. When she turned around, she saw a well-upholstered gentleman, elegantly dressed, sitting next to the drunkard. The stranger grinned at her and waved hello with a heavily jeweled hand. The young girl curtsied and then, too shy to do anything else, rushed out of the living room back to the kitchen.
The man was her godfather.
She knew well it was him because after her sisters had left she had found a newspaper scrap with his picture inside her mother’s bureau drawers. Why else would her mother keep a picture of a rich man living in New York if the man wasn’t her godfather? The picture was from 1903, but he looked exactly the same as he did in that old photograph; not one single hair was different: a handsome, middle aged man; rather stout, but graceful in his movements—if that’s a quality that could be guessed from a smirk in a picture.
The young girl’s heart pounded so fast that she almost fainted. Leading a sad existence didn’t mean she had no faith in a better future. All those months, the hope that her godfather would come to her rescue had grown inside her mangled little heart like a tree growing from a seed that had fallen between cracks of pavement. Harris and his wife had taken her two elder sisters to live with them. The fairy had sent that magnificent dress made of spider silk. Why, if her mean sisters’ godfathers had proved to be so generous, would hers be the exception?
He would come for her one day. She had dreamed of it. He would show up in a silver carriage pulled by eight horses and he would take her to a palace built of white marble. He would invite her to live with him. They would have a ball, every night, and she would invite her sisters to live with them too, and they wouldn’t be mean to her; they would actually be quite pleasant, impressed by the luxury of her new home and her newly acquired refinements. And on her wedding day, to some handsome prince from an exotic, faraway land, her godfather would walk her down the aisle and give her his blessing. Or maybe he would be the one to marry her—could you marry your own godfather? If you could, she would say yes, yes, I do, by all means, I love you and I want to be your wife and I will give you a dozen babies. All of them would survive, she thought, she wouldn’t kill any, like her mother had, and they would live happily ever after…
After finding the photograph she had managed to piece some more facts together. The vampire lived between London and New York, but he had property in Southern California. He was an important man in both the realms of the dead and the living, with plenty of power and money. His name appeared often in the newspapers, attending some charity ball or the inauguration of a bank or a new factory.
And now he was here, sitting in her living room, wearing a tweed suit and a Panama hat, next to the man she called father. What else could he be here for if not