When Venus Fell Read Free Page B

American history we barely deserved to pledge allegiance to the flag. Cameron ancestors had settled the colonial wilderness of Tennessee’s mountains, built themselves an estate of enduring grandeur, and were the centerpiece of social and civic life in the southern heartlands. We homegrown Arinellis were a twentieth-century creation, scraping for acceptance, only one generation removed from all things foreign and exotic and therefore vaguely notorious.
    When I was a child Mom happily told and retold the story of her and Pop’s wedding at Cameron Hall. In 1968 my parents were on tour in Nashville, Tennessee, with a Top 40 show called
Dance Parade
, which was sponsored by Decca Records. Mom and Pop heard about an inn that had just opened high in the mountains east of Nashville—wild, beautiful, difficult territory that the lowland world still regarded with awe and, occasionally, fear.
    Mom didn’t confess that she and Pop weren’t married when she called to reserve a room, and Gib’s family never thought to ask. Those years in the late sixties were the last gasp of social innocence—or at least the pretense of innocence.
    The Camerons took my parents in as if they were kinfolk, a welcome my mother never forgot, because she had no family, and neither did Pop. Pop proposed to her there, and the Camerons organized a quick wedding in their own family chapel.
    It was amazing that Mom and Pop married at all; Pop always said he wouldn’t let the government sanctify
any
part of his life, and he considered marriage certificates one more way the government sought to regulate people. Yet he married Mom and loved her dearly, just as he loved my sister and me. I’ve never doubted that.
    Mom and Pop wrote a song on their wedding day titled “Evening Star,” which hinted, of course, at my name. Venus. The song was the only top-ten single Mom ever recorded.
    I was born not quite nine months after the wedding.
    So I was probably conceived at Cameron Hall.
    That was the closest any Arinelli had come to being a pioneer.
    I started picking out songs on the piano when I was two. By the time I turned three I could—with Pop’s excited coaching—struggle through one or two simple little concertos. I couldn’t recall a time when I didn’t play the piano. Pop never forced music on me, though. I was addicted to it, and when I was alone in our music room I practiced at my gleaming black Steinway and chatted happily with Gib, who posed in Mom and Pop’s wedding photo atop the baby grand in a silver frame.
    I practiced piano for several hours each day and had lessons three times a week with the famous concert pianist Madame Le Ong; it was an enormous honor for her to accept me as a student. She called the wedding photograph a distraction but Pop let me keep it on the piano anyway.
    In it Gib was a handsome, solemn, dark-haired boy, about five years old. He perched at the top of stone steps that led up to the Cameron chapel. The chapel sat atop a small hill covered in grass. Ivy graced its stone walls and flowers vined across the carved beams of its porch. Sunlight gleamed on the copper bell cupola. Enormous round mountains jutted up in the background.
    His family—a much older brother and the brother’s wife, two baby sisters, and two peculiar-looking middle-aged aunts—posed around him. But Mom and Pop stood in the center of the small group in front of the chapel’s doors.
    Mom wore a pale minidress and carried a bouquet of wildflowers; her hair was set in its perfect flipped-up style. Pop was the handsomest man in the world, tall and straight, his black hair gleaming.
    In his dress shirt and crisp dark trousers, Gib looked equally handsome. He had one arm draped over a big, light-eyed dog with a large, jaunty bow tied around its neck. Sincethe picture was in black and white, I had no idea of Gib’s hair or eye color, or the color of the dog. I wondered endlessly what Gib thought of Shari Kirk and Max Arinelli, a perky pop-song singer