“I had a dizzy spell at work,” she said. “I think I ate some tainted food.” Her vocabulary for depression and her justifications for the pharmaceuticals were endless. Her contradictions were also. She was physically brave and did not fear disease, mortality, or notions about perdition. She believed most men were meretricious by nature, yet these were the same avuncular men who usually ended up victimizing her.
“Sit down. I’ll fix that for you.”
“Thank you, Aaron. You’re such a good boy. I left that salad too long in the icebox. I’m sure that was it. This man came in. He was from San Angelo. He wanted to open an account. I told him that wasn’t one of my duties. He seemed to pay no attention to what I told him. He insisted he knew me.” She was sitting at the table now, looking into space as though speaking to herself. “He used my childhood nickname with a smirk on his face,” she said. “He told me who my brothers were, as though I didn’t know their names. I told him to please go to Mr. Benbow’s desk and open his account. I told him I didn’t appreciate his presumption. Then I went into the lunchroom and ate that salad even though it had a funny taste. I’m so distressed and angry at myself. I’m sorry to bother you with this, Aaron. I just get so confused.”
“He’s just one of those worthless fellows we have to forget about,” I said.
“That is exactly what he is. There is nothing lower than that kind of white man. They abuse Negroes and use social situations to let their eyes linger on a woman’s person. They’re common and coarse and invasive and enjoy humiliating the defenseless. Sometimes I want to do violent things to them. I really do.” She was knotting her hands, the nails leaving tiny half-moons on the heel. “Would you take me to Mrs. Ludiki’s house? I need to order my thoughts. I don’t know why I allowed myself to be upset by this common, rude man.”
She had never learned to drive. In my opinion, Mrs. Ludiki was a curse; she was a fortune-teller raised in the caves outside Granada who spoke a dialect she called gitano. She lived in a small paintless frame house surrounded by persimmon and pomegranate trees that left rotting fruit all over the lawn. I didn’t believe she was a confidence woman, nor did I believe she practiced black arts. It was the other way around. I believed she had a natural insight into people and their propensities, and her “readings” were foregone conclusions about a person’s behavior. The problem was the credulity and desperation of my mother. Mrs. Ludiki listened and gave warnings that grew not out of the zodiac but out of my mother’s emotional and mental illness.
I didn’t argue, though. There were worse people than Mrs. Ludiki. She had hair like a porcupine that she tried to mash down under a bandana, and she wore so many gold chains and glass necklaces and so much hooped jewelry that she rattled when she walked. Her “reading room” was a gas chamber of incense and perfumed candles. The centerpiece was her deck of tarot cards; the iconography had its origins in Egypt and Byzantium and the legends of Crusader knights seeking the Grail. The deck was a pictorial history of the Western world’s cultural debt to the Middle East.
My mother’s conversations with Mrs. Ludiki were always circuitous. She could not bring herself to say she was afraid; she could not admit her addiction to pharmaceuticals; she could not admit that she was forced to quit high school in the tenth grade and go to work, nor that she had married a man much older than she when she was seventeen, as though poverty and loneliness and desperation were unacceptable in the sight of the Creator.
“I’ve felt terribly out of sorts,” she said to Mrs. Ludiki. “Nothing on a grand scale, of course. Like this morning at the bank. A man was discourteous and kept insisting he knew me when he didn’t. Actually, it doesn’t bother me. I’m quite all right now, except for a mild case of food poisoning. How have you been, Mrs. Ludiki?”
“I think we can get to the root of these problems quickly, Mrs. Broussard,” Mrs. Ludiki said, laying out the tarot cards in a wheel. “Look. There’s the man carrying staves on his back, his burden about to break him. He takes out his unhappiness on others. He resents spirituality and goodness in others and is to be pitied and not feared.”
“You think that’s the man I met this morning?”
“Yes, I do. So I’ll put him back in the deck and leave him to his fate.”
I thought we were finished. But Mrs. Ludiki, like all people who toy with the delicate membrane that holds the soul together, had unlocked doors that my mother never should have walked through.
“Who is the figure tied upside down on the tree?” my mother asked.
“That’s the Hanged Man.” Mrs. Ludiki tried to pick up the card and replace it in the deck before the conversation went further.
“That’s the death card, isn’t it?” my mother asked. She pressed her finger on the edge of the card.
“The Hanged Man is Saint Sebastian, the first martyr of Rome. He was a soldier executed by his fellow soldiers.”
My mother studied the card carefully. The figure was pale-bodied and effeminate, covered only by a loincloth. “He bears a resemblance to Aaron. Look. It’s uncanny.”
“No, we mustn’t transfer the wrong meaning from this card, Mrs. Broussard.”
“Are those arrows?”
“They’re darts. The Legionnaires fired darts from their crossbows.”
“What’s the next card in the deck?”
“I don’t know. Let’s move on and look at these other things in our wheel,” Mrs. Ludiki said, her eyes veiled. “There is certainly prosperity here. Good health as well. Yes, there are very positive indicators working in your life.”
“No, the Hanged Man is at the apex of the wheel. When there is an ambiguity in the card, you always supplement it with another. Please show me
the next card, Mrs. Ludiki.”
Mrs. Ludiki turned over the top card on the deck and placed it below the Hanged Man. It showed a skeleton wearing black armor and riding a white horse.
“That’s the Fourth Horseman of the Book of Revelation,” my mother said.
“Yes, it is,” Mrs. Ludiki said.
“Death?”
“Yes.”