As a son of the Muse of Tragedy, and one who lived, most of the year, only a few miles from the entrance to the Underworld, Harold Belisle was naturally somewhat prone to somber musings on the value of existence. Was it really better, he wondered now and then, to be conceived and born than not? Was mere being really such an overwhelming good as to be unconditionally worth the pain and sorrow that, both in the mortal realm and among the gods, inevitably seemed to accompany it? Generally, he concluded that it was – for the fierce Greek joy in life, without which classical tragedy would have been merely tawdry, was also knit into his bones – but, now and then, he did wonder.
He wondered, for instance, at around nine o'clock on March 29, 1993, when his mother appeared in his bedroom, just as he was starting work on an English paper that absolutely had to be completed that evening, and whisked him off to L.A. International to catch a red-eye flight for New York City, so that (as best as he understood it) he could turn one of his cousins into an accursed bottle of perfume. He very much wondered then.
"Winterfresh, honey?" Melpomene asked him, extending a blue-wrapped stick of chewing gum as the plane began to taxi down the darkened runway.
Harold took it mechanically, his mind elsewhere. "Mom," he said slowly, "can you explain to me again what I'm doing on this flight?"
Melpomene's eyes narrowed. "Was I not clear the first time?" she said, with that tone in her voice that Zeus's offspring always seemed to get when it was suggested that anything about them was less than sublime.
Harold, who had dealt with more than his fair share of Olympians in his fourteen years, heard the tone and navigated skillfully around it. "You may have been," he said, "but I don't think I really followed it. I was pretty focused on my paper, you know…"
"Harold, I told you, don't worry about that," his mother said. "I'll call Clio after our meeting and tell her you need some extra inspiration, and you'll have it finished before the return flight takes off. She owes me a favor anyway."
"Yeah, I know that, and thanks," said Harold. "But I just meant that, when you dropped in, I wasn't really in the frame of mind to process a whole story of godly rivalry. I caught a bunch of the details, but the total pattern kind of escaped me. So if you could give it to me again, I'd like to try and see if I can get it this time."
That, he thought, was a suitably self-effacing way of telling a goddess that she hadn't made any sense the first time around. And it seemed that Melpomene thought so, too, for, rather than turning him into a goat where he sat, she sighed and said, "Very well. It started precisely six years ago – or not precisely, I suppose, since that was the 30th and this is the 29th. In any case, it was on the night of the 1986 Oscars."
"Meaning the Oscars for 1986, right?" Harold interjected. "Not the Oscars in 1986, since six years ago was 1987."
"Precisely," said Melpomene. "The fifty-ninth annual Academy Awards, held on March 30th, 1987, to recognize achievement in the motion-picture arts and sciences during the year 1986."
She didn't actually add, Now stop interrupting me with persnickety questions that you already know the answers to, but the clipped precision of her tone made her feelings clear, and Harold obligingly popped his gum into his mouth and devoted his oral energy to chewing it. (Which was probably just as well, as the plane had by now left the ground, and his ears were starting to feel the pressure difference.)
"Well," said Melpomene, "of course Dionysus, who regards the Academy Awards as the equivalent of those theatrical festivals that the Athenians used to dedicate to him, makes a point of attending every year, and your Aunt Thalia and I used to frequently accompany him. We did so that year – all the more readily, in fact, since we both happened to have sons up for the Best Director award."
Harold tried to remember who had been up for Best Director of 1986. Was that the year that John Huston had made Prizzi's Honor? That would be pretty cool, actually, having the guy who made The Maltese Falcon for a half-brother. It would almost make up for the Sirens.
"As it happened," Melpomene continued, "the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion had a new doorman that year – a tall, handsome Italian named Raoul Fraccalvieri. Neither of us could help noticing him as we entered, and neither of us could help noticing that the other had noticed. So, rather than start another Trojan War, we made a deal: if Allen won the directing award that night, Thalia would get to seduce Raoul; if Oliver won, I would; if, by some odd chance, one of the other three won, both of us would leave him alone – until the next year, anyway."
Under other circumstances, Harold might have rolled his eyes at the casual amorality of his uranionic relatives; at that moment, though, he was distracted by the hints that his mother had dropped to the demigod directors' identities. Allen, he thought. That's Woody Allen, I suppose. I should have guessed. But who's Oliver? Unless... oh, no. Don't tell me I'm related to Oliver Stone.
"So what happened?" he said.
"Well, Oliver won, of course," said Melpomene, "and so I took Raoul off to a little place I know of out by Silver Lake, and we…" She trailed off, and coughed delicately. "Well, there's no need for you to know all the details."
Harold silently but fervently agreed.
"In any case," Melpomene continued, "the important part is what happened back at the post-Oscar party that Dionysus and Thalia went to. Obviously, I have no first-hand knowledge of this, but Dionysus told me most of it afterwards; he felt guilty, apparently, for putting the idea in her mind… as well he might," she added darkly.
"What idea's that?" said Harold.
"Well, Thalia, naturally, got into a royal snit when my son's film beat hers'," said Melpomene. "She believed, and still believes, that Hannah and Her Sisters is one of her greatest triumphs this century, and that it should lose to such a hackneyed piece of schlock as Platoon – her words – seemed to her to be conclusive evidence that I have the Academy paid off, just as she used to believe that I had the Dionysia paid off because Aristophanes never won the laurel." She snorted. "I do wonder, sometimes, how many more millennia it's going to take before she realizes that her role in theater just might be naturally subordinate to mine."
"A lot, probably," said Harold, who knew from personal experience how stubborn the gods could be about the dignities of their patronages – and who, in any event, privately suspected that his aunt might have been right about the Academy. "Okay, so Aunt Thalia was in a snit. What happened then?"
"Oh, she sat in a corner sulking for an hour or so," said Melpomene, "sipping wine coolers and scowling at the reveling filmmakers. And Dionysus, who of course hates to see anyone pooping a party, came up to her every now and then and tried to talk her out of it. He never told me all of what he said, but, apparently, it eventually occurred to him to make some limp joke about how the Academy didn't respect me either, since I was at that moment off making children of a lesser god, and the woman who made that movie hadn't even been nominated."
"What movie?" Harold said, bewildered.
"Children of a Lesser God."
"Oh." Harold thought for a moment. "Oh, right. That's the one with…" and he waved his hands in a vague mimicry of sign language.
"Marlee Matlin, yes," said Melpomene, her tone suddenly bitter enough to cure malaria. "Who happened, by the malevolence of fate, to sashay past Thalia and Dionysus's table just at that moment, and put the whole matter of the acting awards into Thalia's head. In a flash, apparently, she saw how she could use the titles of the three movies that had just won in those categories to exact what seemed to her an appropriate vengeance on me – so she rose to her feet and proclaimed that the children I would bear as a result of that night's union would indeed be children of a lesser god; that they would also be Hannah and her sisters; and (with, Dionysus says, particular relish in her voice) that they would be the color of money."
Harold blinked. "Excuse me?" he said.
"The color of money," Melpomene repeated. "Paul Newman, Best Actor."
"Yeah, I know that," said Harold, "but what did she mean, they'd be it? Was there supposed to be a dollar bill somewhere that wouldn't have been green unless they'd been born?"
"No, of course not," said Melpomene. "In the first place, because it was a goddess speaking, the reference was to Olympian money – golden drachmae, not greenbacks. In the second place, if I were to say that your hair was the color of ripe wheat, I wouldn't mean that it was off in a field somewhere rendering the grain visible, would I?"
Harold ran a hand through his thatched blond hair unconsciously. "No, I guess not," he said. "You'd just mean it had the same kind of color as the other. But how can a person have the same coloring as a gold drachma?"
"How can a person have the ears of an ass?" Melpomene retorted. "When an Olympian decides to show off her power, anything's possible short of a logical contradiction. And it's no good protesting, because the children were born, nine months later, exactly as she said: three identical girl triplets, their skin and eyes – and hair, later, I found – the precise color of burnished gold, and a note from the Fates informing me that one of them was to be named Hannah."
Harold whistled. "Wow," he said. "The Mist must have had a doozy of a time covering that up."
"The Mist," Melpomene said coldly, "had, and has, no effect whatever on the girls. The whole purpose of the curse was to make them conspicuous to the plethora of monsters roaming Los Angeles – a thing it would hardly do unless each of them naturally dispelled Mist from her immediate environment."
Harold gaped at her. The Mist had already saved his and his friends' lives more times than he could readily count; the notion of half-bloods who were unable to use it – and precisely because they needed it so badly…
"She hated them that much?" he whispered.
"Don't be silly," said Melpomene. "She didn't care about them one way or the other. I was the one she was miffed at."
"Yeah, but they're the ones who suffered."
"Are you implying that I don't suffer when my children do?"
Harold could hardly argue with that. For all that the Olympians acted cool and remote towards their mortal offspring, he'd seen plenty of evidence that, deep down, they were just as invested in them as any human parent would have been. So there was some logic to his aunt's action – but, still, to do something like that to three innocent girls just because you were mad at their mother… maybe there really was something heartless about comedy.
"So what happened to them?" he asked.
"Very little," said Melpomene simply. "I delivered them to their father, as of course I must, and explained the situation to him; he vowed to conceal them as well as he could, and he seems to have been successful. At any rate, the last time I checked up on them, all three were still living; indeed, all things considered, they were faring quite well. But one could scarcely call them happy. Few children could be happy who had never been allowed to leave their home, and were only rarely permitted to approach a window – and these three, it must be remembered, were of Olympian blood."
Harold felt a wave of nausea that had nothing to do with airsickness. He tried to choke it down unobtrusively, but his mother must have seen it in his face, for she pulled a barf bag out of the seat pocket in front of her and handed it to him solemnly. "Go ahead, Harold," she said. "I should hope that no child of mine would feel otherwise."
Harold managed a weak smile. "No, that's okay, Mom," he said. "It's bad, but not that kind of bad."
"You're sure?"
Harold nodded, and Melpomene shrugged, replaced the bag in the pocket, and continued with her story. "Well, obviously," she said, "once I had dropped off the triplets, the next step was to concoct a suitable vengeance against Thalia. A goddess has her honor to think of, after all."
Harold stifled a sigh; he had seen this part coming. No doubt the two Muses had spent the last five years inflicting ever-escalating indignities upon each other, and had by now reached the point where their children's assistance was required to be as vicious as they wanted to be. Well, he didn't really mind; after what he'd just heard, he had no objection to helping make his aunt think a bit about how nice it wasn't to do things like that to her nieces. He still didn't see how the thing about perfume fit in, though…
Then, suddenly, a piece clicked in his mind. His mother hadn't actually said perfume; she'd said scent. In fact – and his blood ran cold at the thought – she had, he was almost certain, said scent of a woman. And, if memory served… he hadn't actually caught the Oscars that afternoon, but the favorite for Best Actor, everyone had said…
No, he thought frantically. She wouldn't.
But he knew better, of course. He'd just heard her blandly accept the notion that children might be cursed out of hatred for their mother – and he'd heard her talk about "a suitable vengeance", which, in Olympian terms, generally meant doing to the other person exactly what she had done to you.
But she wouldn't, he thought, with that instinctive loyalty that all children want to have for their parents – that loyalty that is less about the parent's specific character than about the general conviction that one did not originate from something irredeemably evil. Even if she did, she wouldn't.
And, thus irrationally fortified against the answer he knew was coming, he was able to ask, "So you cursed her next set of children to match the 1987 acting winners, then?"
Melpomene snorted. "I wish," she said. "The Untouchables… a few of Thalia's brood perpetually cut off from all physical contact: that would have been a fitting riposte, if you like."
Again, Harold had to pause to remind himself that this sort of thing didn't make him the spawn of essential wickedness. This done, he asked, "So why didn't you do it?"
"Because," said Melpomene, "when I got back to Parnassus, I found that the Fates had left me a note requesting my presence in Their cavern. They knew the whole story, of course, it being one of the affairs of gods and men that They govern, and apparently They were concerned that I would presume upon their cooperation in my vengeance – since it was quite possible, after all, that a curse compounded of randomly selected film titles would have to dictate the victim's future destiny, and not just his circumstances at birth."
Harold frowned. "How do you mean?"
"Well, I'll give you the example they used," said Melpomene. "Suppose that, instead of Michael Caine having won Best Supporting Actor that year for Hannah and Her Sisters, Dennis Hopper had won it for Hoosiers. Then Thalia's curse would have had to dictate, not only the sex, number, and color of the triplets, but also their state of residence – and, since Raoul didn't live in Indiana at the time, that would have meant either modifying his destiny so that he would move there, or molding the destinies of the girls so that, someday, they would. Either way, the weaving of the Fates would have had to be affected in order to fulfill the terms of the curse – and the Fates," she added, with a small, tight-lipped smile, "don't like it when uppity little goddesses presume to tell Them how to weave."
No, Harold supposed not. "So They told you hands off?" he said. "If a set of titles contained one like that, you weren't allowed to use it?"
"Oh, no," said Melpomene. "They didn't mind working my curse into Their weaving, if it was appropriate. Indeed, they seemed rather delighted by the notion; I think They saw it as a sort of challenge, like those writing contests that require you to work a certain phrase into the story. But they said they were going to make sure that I played fair."
"Fair?" Harold repeated, now thoroughly at sea. "What do you mean, fair?" None of this seemed fair to him.
Instead of replying, Melpomene reached into the beaded purse at her waist and pulled out two folded sheets of paper. "See for yourself," she said, extending them to him.
Harold, baffled but compliant, took the papers, unfolded them, and read the following:
By the Wisdom that guides Our weaving, We do hereby pledge to accept and bring about any one (1) doom laid by Melpomene, Muse of Tragedy, on her sister Thalia, Muse of Comedy, of the type by which the said Melpomene did recently bear the demigoddesses Laura, Phoebe, and Hannah Fraccalvieri, as this type is defined and circumscribed in the following paragraphs:
A. All terms of a Fraccalvieri-type doom shall be phrased in the following manner: "[He/She/They] shall be…" followed by the title of a motion picture that has received an Academy Award for acting during the previous year.
B. No Fraccalvieri-type doom shall be valid unless the title of each acting winner of the previous year is included in a distinct term thereof.
Γ. Where necessary and coherent, it shall be licit to introduce into a term, immediately after "[He/She/They] shall be", an article that does not appear in the original motion-picture title; but no other part of speech shall be thus introduced, and no article shall be introduced at any other point in a term.
Δ. No Fraccalvieri-type doom shall be verbally identical to a previous such doom.
E. All terms of a doom must be descriptive of the same individual or group of individuals at the same moment in time; irreconcilable incompatibility as regards number, gender, or any such thing, shall render a doom null and void.
Z. The person(s) resulting from a doom shall retain (his/her/their) proper mode of being as (an) independent substance(s); no doom shall be valid that shall necessarily regard (him/her/them) as (a) quantit(y/ies), qualit(y/ies), relation(s), place(s), time(s), position(s), state(s), action(s), or affection(s).
H. The use of a word, not a proper name, in a certain sense in a motion-picture title shall not preclude its use in another sense in a doom, if such latter sense can be verified as legitimate through consultation of the then-current edition of the Oxford English Dictionary.
Θ. No word of a doom shall be used as a proper name, unless such word signify a proper name in the original motion-picture title; and no word denoting the surname of a person in a motion-picture title shall be used to denote the Christian name of a person doomed, or vice versa. However, the denotation, in a motion-picture title, of a proper name by a word of a doom, shall be no barrier to its use in the doom as a common noun or other part of speech.
I. No person shall be described in a doom by more than one surname or Christian name, except where such names (i) are assigned multiply in a single motion-picture title to a single individual, or (ii) can be shown to be recognized variants of the same name within the same language.
K. No proper name shall be used in a doom to denote an entity of a species other than that of which the entity is, or is feigned to be, that the name denotes in the relevant motion-picture title, nor shall any Christian name denote an entity of a different gender from that of the individual thus identified therein.
KA. An isolated surname in a title may be used in a doom to denote multiple persons sharing that surname, provided that these persons are all of a species with the person(s) described by that surname in the title.
KB. No person resulting from a doom shall be identified with any previously existing entity.
KΓ. All dooms shall regard the person(s) doomed as the immediate carnal offspring of Thalia, Muse of Comedy, and of the next male being with whom she shall lie, with all relationships therein implied; any doom, necessarily reckoning by adoptive descent, shall be null and void.
KΔ. The laying of a doom shall not compel the Muse of Comedy to lie with any male being, either specifically or in general; however, in the event of a doom being dependent upon the identity of the father of the person(s) doomed, the said Muse shall remain barren until such time as she shall lie with a male being suitable thereto.
In witness whereof We have herein inscribed Our names this day, the ninth day of Poseideon in the third year of the 691st Olympiad, which is the eleventh day of Januarius in the 2,741st year of the founding of the Roman city, or the twenty-ninth day of December in the 1,987th year of the nativity of Jesus of Nazareth:
Clotho Moira
Lachesis Moira
Atropos Moira
Harold read this over two or three times, marveling at the hitherto unsuspected (by him, anyway) legal acumen of the Three Sisters. "Well," he said at length. "I guess that about covers everything."
"It ought to," said Melpomene coldly. "They said that the three of Them had spent the whole of the first week of April reviewing all the titles of all the nominated films in all the acting categories in all the 59 years of the award up to that date, so as to be sure of not neglecting any possible ambiguity."
"Well, that's thorough of Them," said Harold. "So anyway, They gave you this paper, and then… what?"
"Then I waited," said Melpomene. "I waited three months for the next award ceremony to provide me with a curse for Thalia's spawn – only it didn't, because Best Actor went to a film called Wall Street, which is a place and not a substance, and so the 1987 curse was disqualified under the sixth section of that little injunction there. Then I waited another year for the 1988 curse – but in 1988 Best Actor went to Rain Man, while Best Supporting Actor went to A Fish Called Wanda, which was an irreconcilable conflict of nature under the fifth section. Then in 1989 Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress both went to a film called My Left Foot, which, since I already had a left foot, disqualified that curse under the eleventh section. Then in…"
"Hang on," said Harold. "Why couldn't the curse mean that the left foot you have now wasn't the only one you were ever going to have? Say there was going to be a great conflict with the Titans or something, and you were going to lose your foot protecting Parnassus from one of them, and Apollo or somebody would turn this child into a replacement foot and unite it to your body. Wouldn't that work? I mean, sure it would be pretty weird, but no weirder than some of the other things that have happened in our family."
Melpomene gave him a look in which surprise and pride were mingled about evenly. "Very good, Harold," she said. "Yes, I could have done that, of course – but there were two other titles to consider, as well. Tell me, how could Thalia's child, having been turned into my foot, come to be driving Miss Daisy?"
Harold shrugged. "Some creatures could drive a car with one foot, I suppose," he said. "And you're a goddess, so turning into an orangutan wouldn't be that hard for you. Or it could mean that the foot was somehow driving her crazy, or driving her off Parnassus, or something like that."
"And Glory?"
Harold thought for a moment. "Maybe Miss Daisy could be some great and terrible enemy," he said, "and, in driving her away, the foot could become the glory of Parnassus."
"A-ha," said Melpomene. "So your idea of a curse on Thalia is that I get myself crippled so that her child can become the glory of Parnassus?"
Well, when she put it that way… "Oh," said Harold. "So it's not just that the titles have to all add up; they all have to add up to something bad for the person."
"I believe that was the point of all this, yes," said Melpomene, her tone indicating that he had given her the impression, just now, of being a little quicker than this. Nor could Harold really blame her; it had been pretty stupid of him to forget that all this was the result of his mother's all-consuming Olympian vindictiveness.
Never mind, never mind, she's a good person deep down… "Okay, so 1989 was out. How about 1990?"
"Good Fellas and Ghost," said Melpomene. "Irreconcilable conflict of number, fifth section. And 1991 was a double whammy: the two lead awards both went to The Silence of the Lambs, and silence not only isn't a substance, it's not even the absence of a substance; of the supporting awards, one went to the plurally titled City Slickers, and the other to the singularly titled The Fisher King.
"But now I've got Them," she continued, her eyes suddenly gleaming with fierce triumph. "Do you know what won this evening, Harold?"
Harold shook his head. "I had other priorities," he said. "I gather that Pacino finally won his Best Actor award, since you mentioned…"
"Scent of a Woman," said Melpomene. "Yes, indeed, Al got Best Actor; Emma Thompson picked up Best Actress for Howard's End; Gene Hackman won Supporting Actor for Unforgiven; and Marisa Tomei, to everyone's surprise and my delight, took home Supporting Actress for My Cousin Vinny. Put them all together, and what do you have?"
Harold thought for a moment. "Um… a demigod named Vinny who brings about the end of someone named Howard, and, instead of being forgiven for it, gets turned into a bottleful of scent and given to some woman or other?"
"Bingo." Melpomene smirked. "If that isn't a doom of woe, I don't know what is."
"Yeah, I guess it would be," Harold allowed. "But how can you lay it on a child of Aunt Thalia's? The Tomei film's title says My Cousin Vinny, but any son Aunt Thalia had would be your nephew, not your cousin."
"Yes, he would, wouldn't he?" said Melpomene. "Good thing I have a son of my own here on this plane with me, whose cousin he would be – and who, I'm sure, would be entirely willing to curse his cousin on behalf of his mother, who gave him life and whom he loves so very much."
She shot this son a meaningful glance, and Harold froze in his seat. She meant… she was asking… but he couldn't. It was different for her – she was a goddess, they were supposed to be amoral – but if he did something like that…
But, on the other hand, if he didn't do it – if he spurned a goddess to her face, and she his mother to boot…
Harold swallowed hard. So this was how it felt, being faced with Orestes's choice: to piously obey the gods' demand for impiety, or to uphold natural law in the face of the rulers of Nature. If he hadn't been so horrified, the sheer absurdity of it would almost have made him laugh.
Come on, Belisle, he thought. There has to be a way out of this. Read the riddle; find a loophole; make her see that it won't work after all. There must be something…
"What about rule 10?" he said. "If you're giving the child the name Vinny, then he has to be the same kind of thing as the Vinny in the movie was. I haven't seen My Cousin Vinny, but I'll bet the title character isn't a bottleful of scent."
Melpomene gave him a withering look. "Neither will Thalia's child be, when he receives the name," she said. "You said it yourself: he starts out as a demigod, and only becomes a woman's scent in retribution for being Howard's end. Really, Harold, you're not usually as dull as this."
"But the rules say that all the titles have to refer to him at the same moment," Harold persisted, "and, at that moment, he's scent, right? So the name, in the doom, is denoting scent, not a human, so…"
"Harold," said Melpomene, turning full in her seat and leveling a dangerous glare at him. "Are you trying to frustrate my vengeance?"
Harold often wished, afterwards, that he had had the nerve to tell the truth. Why, yes, Mother dear, that's exactly what I'm doing; it's what any decent person would do, when confronted with a proposal so appallingly wicked as yours. Antigone could have done it, he was sure; Aeneas could have done it; Anthony of Egypt, so the story went, actually had done it. But Harold Belisle, having never received the solid moral grounding that had given those heroes the strength to defy the rulers of Nature (he had, after all, been raised on the campus of UCLA-Berkeley), instead swallowed spasmodically and stammered, "Well, not really… I mean, no, I'm not, it's just…"
"I should hope not," said Melpomene shortly. "Listen, then, and then let's have no more quibbling. When the gods transform someone into a spider, a laurel tree, or what have you, that person does not thereby lose his original inscape; he remains spiritually the individual that he was born, despite being physically whatever he may have been turned into. If that weren't so, there would be no sense in saying that the spider in question was Arachne, or that Daphne was the laurel tree. So there is no contradiction in calling Thalia's son by his rightful name of Vinny at the moment when he is outwardly an attar of roses rather than the human he was born. The tenth section has nothing to do with that; it's there to prevent me from afflicting a human child with the name Equus, or Sounder, or Kentucky, or some other proper name that was never intended to apply to a human being. Is that clear?"
"Yes, ma'am," said Harold humbly.
"Good," said Melpomene.
And, with that, she lifted the complementary headphones off her seat, slipped them on her head, and focused her attention on the in-flight movie (The Bodyguard starring Whitney Houston, winner of a merciful zero Oscars that afternoon). Harold, meanwhile, slouched down in his seat, stared out the window, and tried to focus his mind on something other than what he wasn't going to have the spine not to do in a few hours.
More or less to his surprise, what came before his mind's eye was the image of these three half-sisters he apparently had. Not merely the idea of them, but actually the image: three identical little girls with burnished-gold hair and skin, nestling disconsolately on a floor around a coloring book with a barred window directly above them. He found he could even distinguish them by their different demeanors: Phoebe, quiet and somber, like a child Cassandra; Hannah, fidgety with repressed native ebullience; Laura, graceful and mature beyond her years, somehow managing to convey confident hopefulness just in the way she reached for a crayon.
How he knew which name belonged to which girl – or how he knew other details unmentioned by his mother, such as the dainty bone structure that made each triplet look even more like a finely wrought statuette – how, in short, he was seeing this at all – was a fair question, but not one he bothered to ask. The vision itself moved him too deeply; it seemed to offer him a kind of solution to the mess he found himself in – to say that these three luckless demigoddesses were the center of the whole problem, and that the alleviation of their wretchedness, if someone could accomplish it, would somehow partly make up for any evils done elsewhere.
For the next few hours of the flight, as the night-shrouded expanses of the American West unfurled themselves beneath him, he pondered this vision with the silent intensity of Euripides contemplating the plight of Helen; when, halfway across Kansas, he finally succumbed to his mortal side and fell asleep, it was of the Fraccalvieri triplets that he dreamed. And it may well have been those dreams (which he never afterwards remembered) that set him on the course he would shortly begin to pursue, to the total transformation of his life and those of his vision's objects.
When their flight landed at JFK International, Melpomene attempted to wake her son; then, unsatisfied with his rate of response, lifted him onto his feet, steered him out onto the concourse, and had the two of them in a taxi and barreling down the Van Wyck Expressway before he was fully conscious of his surroundings. The City That Never Sleeps was already reaching for its morning dose of stimulants, but, so far as Harold was concerned, it was still two o'clock in the morning – not an hour when one readily springs up from one's rest, all eagerness to face the world.
Fortunately for him, it was over half an hour's drive from JFK to Parnassus even at 5 A.M., giving him a quite decent interval in which to rally his faculties. By the time the cab reached the Triborough Bridge, he was awake enough to roll his eyes at his mother's old joke about not having left the Hell Gate behind in L.A. after all – and when, soon after, the cabbie pulled up in front of the Guggenheim and stopped to let them out, he was able to open the door and drop his feet onto the pavement in full awareness of where he was and what he was soon to do.
The two of them went around to the Central Park side of the museum; Melpomene unlocked the back door with her private key, and she and Harold slipped inside Wright's masterpiece. (For Harold, though no great fan of modern art, had always agreed with his mother and aunts that the Guggenheim itself was an indisputable masterpiece; he just wished they could have found something more intelligent to put in it.)
As they made their way through the gloom to the elevator, Harold glanced up at the crystal dome overhead, from which he and his half-siblings and cousins had so often gazed down invisibly at the earnest museum-goers. He could see the faces of a couple of the other Muses staring down at him and his mother: Erato, with a look of deep disappointment on her voluptuously lovely face; Clio, with her usual air of being no longer capable of shock at anything gods or mortals might choose to do; and – Harold's heart gave a sudden lurch – Thalia herself.
She was standing on the far edge of the dome, in just the right position so that Harold's eyes exactly met hers – but, as usual with the Muse of Comedy, he could make nothing of the expression in them. In a single glance, she managed to suggest pitying scorn, ultimate resignation, the faintest hint of compunction for her past wickedness, a much stronger amusement at her sister's present vengefulness, and, above all, an unshakable conviction that all would turn out for the best in the end.
The next moment, she and the other two passed from his sight as his mother tugged him into the elevator. As the doors slid shut, she pressed a Mist-shrouded button marked C at the very bottom of the panel; the elevator gave a shuddering lurch, and began the deep descent toward the cavern of the Fates.
Harold had met the Fates once before (though not one-on-one), but he had never called on them in their actual dwelling. What he had been expecting, he could hardly have said, but some sort of dark, eerie chamber heavy with the weight of ages would likely have been high on his list – or, if not that, then perhaps an underground boardroom with a power conference table, to match the modern idea of a hangout for Masters of Destiny. Instead of which, when the Guggenheim elevator halted after some twenty minutes' descent, he found himself and Melpomene emerging into a cramped little room with fading gray walls, lit a sickly green by the flickering fluorescent lighting overhead, and hardly furnished except for the enormous industrial loom rattling continuously in the far corner. (In fact, it was primarily this latter that made the room seem cramped; it was actually no less spacious than the average middle-class dining room, but the loom took up so much space that there was little more than a nook left over.)
The Fates – three impossibly ancient, withered old ladies in plain cotton dresses – were standing in front of the loom and murmuring to each other as the elevator door opened; when Melpomene stepped out into Their cavern, though, the eldest and most withered of Them all turned and grinned broadly. "Ah, so you did decide to drop in, Melly!" She said. "Isn't that just delightful? Lachesis, Atropos, set that thing to automatic, and let's hear what Mnemosyne's little girl has to tell Us."
A moment later, all three Weird Sisters were clustered around the goddess and her son, Their faces fixed in the sort of benignly indulgent expressions that a grandmother entertaining a very small child might have worn. (Harold couldn't help but notice, though, that Their eyes – which were as fresh and bright as the rest of Them was sallow and shriveled – were, one and all, twinkling mischievously, as though They were enjoying a secret far over his and his mother's heads.) "Well, Melly?" said Clotho. "Don't be shy; tell Us all about it. What nasty thing do you have planned for that little hyena of a sister of yours? And what brings your darling boy here to Our cavern?"
If Melpomene was at all intimidated to be thus addressed by the Rulers of gods and men, she gave no outward sign. "I have brought Harold here to pronounce on my behalf the Fraccalvieri Doom of 1992 upon my sister Thalia," she said. "I believe this is permissible, under the laws laid down by Yourselves for such a doom."
"I should think so, yes," said Clotho. "Lachie, what do you think?"
Lachesis shrugged laconically. "Can't hurt anything," she said "Fire away, then, Mr.… Belisle, is it?"
"Um… yes, Ma'am," said Harold. "So… I just start, then?"
"Isn't that what Lach just said?" said Atropos tartly.
"Er… yes," said Harold. "Right. Okay."
He took a deep breath, and focused his mind on the image of the triplets – not so much to rouse himself to vengeful wrath, as to keep himself from thinking about what he was doing to the hapless Vinny. "I, Harold Belisle," he declaimed, "do hereby pronounce the following doom on the next child of the goddess Thalia, Muse of Comedy. He shall be the scent of a woman; he shall be Howard's end; he shall be unforgiven; and he shall be my cousin Vinny." Then, feeling that this wasn't quite adequate, he added, meaninglessly, "So mote it be."
Clotho nodded approvingly. "Very nice, very nice," she said. "A lee-tle more attention to elocution in the future, perhaps – nothing very serious, but there was just the tiniest bit of mushiness in your dental consonants – but, on the whole, very well done indeed. You should be proud of him, Melly."
"I don't see why she brought him, though," Atropos remarked. "There wasn't anything in that doom that Melly couldn't have uttered herself, that I can see."
"My Cousin Vinny?" Lachesis suggested.
"Why not?" said Atropos. "The Musae have plenty of uncles wandering around; if Thalia lay with one of them, her child by him would be Melly's cousin on his side, and there you are."
"Yes, but none of those uncles are mortals," Lachesis pointed out. "And a goddess's son by a god or a Titan could hardly be said to be of a species with Vinny Gambini, now could he?"
"Well, a male cousin, then," said Atropos. "The title doesn't say My Simple First Cousin Vinny; a first cousin once removed would do just as well – or a second cousin, or a second cousin once removed, or anything else you like. Define the terms generously enough, and I'm not sure there's a white man on Earth who wouldn't qualify as some sort of cousin of the Musae, and whose son wouldn't therefore also be their cousin at one extra remove. For the Ineffable's sake, even this boy here is Melly's cousin, if you want to look at it that way." (Harold flinched; he was aware, to be sure, that his maternal grandparents had been aunt and nephew, but he didn't care to be reminded of the fact so baldly.)
"Well, maybe," said Lachesis. "But that's not what she decided to do, and I don't see that it's any worse this way. Of course it would have been very amusing to make Thalia barren toward men of exclusively non-Western origin, but Melly isn't obliged to make her plans on the basis of what would most amuse Us Three."
"No, that's true," said Atropos. "And the whole point is really academic, since We won't be doing any of this anyway."
"True, very true," Lachesis agreed wistfully.
"What?" Melpomene exploded.
The Fates all turned to her with the most regretful expressions Their incorrigibly mischievous countenances could assume. "Yes, well, you see, Melly, I'm afraid there's been just the tiniest misunderstanding," said Clotho. "I don't know whether you've seen the marquees – or whether you bothered to read the novel after inspiring it, for that matter – but the title of this year's Best Actress winner doesn't quite bear the interpretation you and Mr. Belisle gave it. It isn't Howard's End, with an apostrophe; it's Howards End, and refers exclusively to the house about which the action revolves. So, by the rules about proper nouns that My sisters were just discussing, the whole doom is disqualified, and your vengeance will have to be put off once again. I'm terribly sorry, I know you had your hopes up, and I quite understand if you want to go up and smash some modern art to make yourself feel better. Don't rightly know what else it's for, to tell you the truth," She added candidly.
Melpomene's face turned deadly pale, and her lips puckered as though she'd bitten into the world's sourest lemon. For a few seconds, she stood motionless, even her breath barely stirring her bosom; then, with a motion so sharp and fierce that Harold instinctively ducked into a defensive crouch, she turned on her heel and strode with footsteps like gunshots back to the elevator.
"Better luck next year!" Clotho called over the slam of the elevator door.
"Though she won't actually have it," She added, turning to Harold. "A word to the wise, young man: if Camp Half-Blood holds an Oscar pool in 1994, go long on Philadelphia for Best Actor. Completely undeserved, of course, since it'll be up against Schindler's List, but there you are. That's the kind of world We're making just now, and it's going to get worse before it gets better."
Harold laughed nervously. "Well," he murmured, "so long as it does get better…"
"Oh, it will," said Clotho, with an inscrutable smile. "Make no mistake, it most certainly will. Though whether you'll enjoy it when it does…"
"Now, Clo, don't go frightening the poor child." Lachesis hobbled up beside Harold and tousled his hair with one bird-like claw. "So, Mr. Belisle, was there anything else you wanted to ask of Us before you went? We do so hate letting nice young men leave here empty-handed."
At any other time, Harold, who knew something of the Fates' taste in gifts, would have turned down this offer with as much firmness as was compatible with scrupulous courtesy. But the thoughts that he had armed himself with in order to pronounce the doom were still beating against his brain, and, when Lachesis said the word, it dawned on him that there was something he wanted from Her and Her sisters – not to undo or alter Their weaving, but to complete, and perhaps to brighten, what They had already done.
"Well, since You ask," he said slowly, "I do kind of wish there were something You could do to help those three girls that all of this got started over. I mean, it's not their fault that Mom got to have them, and letting them suffer for it the rest of their lives just doesn't seem fair. Not that I'm saying You have any obligation to be fair," he added hastily, "but, if You're looking for something to give me, that would be my choice."
Clotho cocked Her head. "What do you propose, Mr. Belisle?" She said. "We have pledged to honor the doom on the Fraccalvieri triplets, and Our word can't be broken so long as the universe abides. And as long as Hannah and her sisters, children of a lesser god, are the color of money, they can't help but be in danger from the monsters of the classical West."
"No, I know that," said Harold. "But I was thinking, couldn't they have some sort of protector? Somebody to fend off the monsters for them, and give them a chance to lead some kind of halfway decent life even with the doom still on them? That would be all right for You to arrange, wouldn't it?"
The three Fates exchanged thoughtful glances, in which Harold thought he could see a faint hint of gratified pride. "Why, yes, Mr. Belisle," said Clotho. "I suppose it would, at that. Of course, We couldn't entrust such a task to just anybody, and worthy champions of the oppressed are dreadfully hard to find these days – but I daresay that one who had the blood of Olympus in his veins, and the bravery and purity of heart needed to stand before the Fates and demand justice of Them, would be as suited to the task as the greatest hero any age could have produced."
This brought Harold up short. "Oh," he said brilliantly, as his ideas rearranged themselves in his head. "Well, that wasn't quite what I was thinking of – but, sure, I guess I could do it." He swallowed. "I mean, what's there to worry about, right? If You're on my side, everything's bound to turn out all right in the end, isn't it?"
The gazes of the Three turned icy, and Harold winced as his glibness was brought home to him. "Right, no, I'm sorry," he said. "You don't make promises like that, do You?"
"No," said Clotho.
Harold was silent for a moment, absorbing all the implications of that monosyllable; then he took a deep breath, squared his shoulders, and looked the Weavers of Destiny squarely in the eye. "You're right, though, it should be me," he said. "They are my sisters, after all – and they've been living right there in L.A. with me all these years without my doing anything to help them, or even knowing they existed. It's high time I made up for that."
"You accept?" said Clotho.
"Yes, Ma'am," said Harold.
Clotho grinned, then, more broadly than Harold would have thought possible. "Then, Harold Belisle," She said, "I, Clotho Moira, bestow upon you The Mission of warding the daughters of Raoul Fraccalvieri."
Lachesis and Atropos broke into delighted giggles at this, which Harold, who hadn't immediately connected "the mission" with the 1986 Cinematography winner, was momentarily mystified by. "Oh, that's lovely, Clo!" said Lachesis. "May I do one, too?"
"By all means," said Clotho.
Lachesis cleared Her throat portentously. "Harold Belisle," She intoned, "I, Lachesis Moira, bestow upon you a Platoon of deathless warriors to aid you in your mission," and Harold jumped nearly out of his skin as thirty grim-faced figures in what looked like Spartan armor appeared out of nowhere to stand rigid as statues behind him.
"You can summon or dismiss them at any time, and they will obey your every command," said Lachesis. "To summon them, you merely say, 'Phylax Platoon, assemble'; to dismiss them, 'Phylax Platoon, disperse.'"
"Huh." Harold turned, and surveyed the serried ranks of his new-formed servants. "Do they have individual names?"
Lachesis shrugged indifferently. "Up to you."
Harold's first instinct was to say that of course they ought to – after all, what was a platoon, and especially a movie platoon, without a Private Mendez or a Corporal O'Kelly? – but, when he looked again at their identically impassive faces, he realized that trying to humanize these creatures might perhaps miss the point. "Well, I'll worry about that later, I guess," he muttered. "Um… Phylax Platoon, disperse!"
The warriors instantly vanished as swiftly and silently as they had come, and Harold grinned involuntarily. "Okay, yeah, that was pretty cool," he said. "Thanks, Ma'am."
"My pleasure," said Lachesis.
"My turn, my turn!" said Atropos, clapping Her hands eagerly. "Let's see, now… A Room with a View, no, that won't work… Aliens, no… oh, I know! Harold Belisle, I, Atropos Moira, bestow upon you a Top Gun!"
Sure enough, a gleaming silver revolver appeared in Harold's right hand, and a holster for it upon his left hip. Harold frowned, and examined it tentatively; as an upscale Californian, he knew little enough about guns, but even he could see that this one was indeed pretty top, with its polished mahogany handle, the exquisiteness of its workmanship, and (when he screwed up his courage enough to look inside the muzzle) its six gleaming bullets of celestial bronze.
"Any shot fired from it will unerringly hit its intended target," said Atropos, "nor will the bullets ever be deformed by impact. And that's important, because only those six bullets will work in it; if you ever load it with ordinary lead, it will never fire again. It is given to you for the defense of your sisters against the monsters that threaten them; it mustn't be used for aggression against mortals. And the holster, of course, is woven of pure Mist, so that no officious policeman can complain about you carrying it without his permission." She beamed expectantly. "Well, what do you think, young man?"
A slow smile stole over Harold's face. "You take my breath away, Ma'am," he said.
Atropos cackled delightedly. "Oh, isn't he a wonder, girls?" She said to Her sisters. "I take back everything I said earlier; I would have been disconsolate if Melly hadn't brought him along."
"Indeed," said Clotho. "Well, Mr. Belisle, run along now; your mother's already wondering what's keeping you. And, if you'll take My advice, you'll get yourself some sleep on the plane back to California; tomorrow's going to be a momentous day, both for you and for certain others, and you ought to be well rested for it."
Whether it was deliberate acquiescence in Clotho's council or simply his own fatigue, Harold didn't know, but he did indeed fall asleep almost as soon as his bottom hit the seat cushion of Flight 107 out of JFK, and didn't wake up again until it was over San Bernardino. Which was just as well, since, by the time he arrived in Los Angeles, it was already seven o'clock, and almost time to get ready and head back out to school.
The school day went by uneventfully enough. His English teacher looked rather disdainful when he turned in the frantically scrawled paper he had written in a white heat on the cab ride back from the Guggenheim, but he had enough confidence in his Aunt Clio's inspiration that he didn't worry too much about it. (Nor need he have; when he got it back next day, there was a neat A-minus adorning its top right-hand corner – and the minus, Harold suspected, was merely for presentation.) And the rest of his classes were such a breeze that he wondered whether the Fates hadn't tweaked his teachers' lesson plans back at the beginning of term, just to give him as little unnecessary stress that day as possible.
If so, he was grateful for it when, that afternoon, he sat on the living-room sofa with the telephone in his hand and the white pages open to F on his lap. He hadn't quite realized, somehow, how difficult it would be to call a complete stranger and identify himself as the Fate-appointed protector of said stranger's three scrupulously sheltered daughters; he had to clamp his free hand around the handle of his gun and focus his entire mind on his vision of the previous night before he could work up the nerve to press the seven buttons that would permanently ratify his destiny.
The phone at the other end rang three times; then there was a click, and a deep, wary voice said, "Hello?"
"Hello, Mr. Fraccalvieri?" said Harold. "I'm Harold Belisle, son of Melpomene. I'm sorry this is so abrupt, but I… well, I need to talk to you about Hannah and her sisters."
Disclaimer: The Oscar, as they say, is a registered trademark of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences; Camp Half-Blood and all that pertains to it is similarly associated with Rick Riordan, while the various films and filmmakers herein mentioned are in the care of their respective studios and selves. I am associated with none of these.