Memoirs of a Lady

Chapter 7: A Past Life

**My thanks and my unabashed admiration to Sonia de Beaumanoir for forcing my characters to speak proper French.**

* * * * *

January 14th. Around us the skies were so gray as to be black.

If God herself were to speak over the airplane intercom to inform all of us passengers that we were being diverted to the next to the last airport on the face of the earth, She couldn't have said it better than:

"Ladies and gentlemen, for your safety, Northwest flight 2671 has been temporarily diverted to land at the Gerald R. Ford international airport in Grand Rapids, Michigan."

Our stewardess, the lovely Chief Stew Barbie, came down the aisle stopping every few rows to tell us all the official company line. "We're sorry for the inconvenience but I'm afraid every major airport from here to Oklahoma City has been closed down due to the blizzard in the great plains states." Did I mention that if ever a grown woman really looked like a Barbie, she did? Like Summer Blond Barbie, she had those frozen blue eyes which gleamed in fashion photo perfection including a star burst lens flare right at the perfect spot for a highlight tucked carefully into each eye. It was uncanny. "This January snow storm has tied up every state in the midwest for the entire night--Indiana, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Minnesota and Wisconsin, umm...the Dakotas and more."

I wanted to tell her how proud I was of her. The lovely Chief Stewardess Barbie could name almost as many states as the lovely Elementary School Teacher Barbie could. l really should write a nice note to her mother.

"But Michigan is open?" My assistant, Suzette queried, remembering what I'd told her about the midwestern United States.

This little remark irritated Barbie because she'd been ready to dismiss the two of us so that she move forward to see all the smiling Kens lined up and waiting in the seats behind us. I could tell by their eager faces that every single Ken seated in No Smoking Business Class had his cigarette lighter out and ready to flick as soon as the Chief Stewardess pulled out her pack of Fetish Barbie's Virginia Slim Ultra Lights (sold separately).

"Only the Gerald R. Ford, and that only for another hour or so," Barbie informed us. "Then they think the entire center of the nation may be snowed in solid for at least a day and a half." She moved passed us to speak to the rest of the plane's business class looking for just the right Ken doll to latch on to for the next day and a half's layover.

God! I made a pun!

The landing was happily uneventful. I was thankful for that, but Suzette would have kissed the tarmac itself, if we didn't have to travel through that artificial accordion gangway tunnel which lead us from the artificial environment of the plane into the artificial environment of the terminal of Gerald R. Ford International. Something inside me expected to see a statue of Chevy Chase tripping over a briefcase.

It was then that I saw the advertisement for the Leonardo da Vinci Horse exhibit. My god, I'd forgotten that it was here. Of all the places in the world to have to land in a winter storm warning, it was Grand Rapids. But it was here on permanent exhibit, for God's sake. The first original bronze casting

Il Cavallo

stands in Milan. The second casting of the Leonardo da Vinci Horse

The American Horse

was purchased and shipped to Grand Rapids, Michigan by Fred Meijer, a local multimillionaire, and placed within one of those monuments which millionaires start to build and then coerse the public to pick up the rest of the price tag. Thus Grand Rapids is blessed with both the Frederick Meijer Gardens and subsequently the American replica of the Leonardo da Vinci Horse.

The airlines put us up at a hotel on 28th Street which is the strip mall area on the city's suburban east side. From there the desk clerk told us that the Gardens were just a few miles away up some highway called the Beltline. Cab fare there and back would cost as much as a day's car rental, but I've never been enthusiastic about driving in snow, and Suzette wasn't much of a driver period.

"Our bags are still on the plane," I said. "I wish I could change."

"You want to change clothes to visit a statue?" Suzette queried.

"Don't you?"

"We could go shopping first," she suggested, twisting her little sardonic blade deep into my psyche. "Maybe Frederick's of Hollywood has something appropriate."

"We're running out of daylight, minx," I teased her. "Let's see the horse first. Once we return to the hotel all we'll need are some terry cloth towels and those percale sheets."

Suzette's eyes flashed, but I made her put her coat on and out we went. I enjoyed teasing her, but she was my assistant, and I have strict rules about sleeping with the help.

The cab dropped us off in front of the Meijer Gardens. A long array of

welcoming sculpture

bedecked its entranceway. Some of the pieces were nearly tolerable.

"Do you know how the Guggenheim Museum in New York became a great museum?" I asked Suzette as we threaded our way through some cookie cutter pieces. "First, the family purchased whatever the hell they felt like buying for years until they had enough stuff--good and bad--to open a public museum. Then they went out and bought more stuff."

"So what's your point, Erica?"

"Finally the museum hired some professionals who kept the real art out in the museum and slowly but surely put the junk stuff back into storage." I told Suzette that it was obvious that the Meijer Gardens were trying to do the same thing with their sculpture. Except they didn't have enough good stuff on display to hide the junk back in storage.

I really don't see this as a fault though. Some potentially good artists had some mediocre works purchased for good money. Still I rushed Suzette past some fairly dreadful pieces as we paid our admission and glanced off to the south side of the main building where the botanical gardens were housed. One thing about nature, she could always sculpt a flower far superior to many of the pieces we saw strewn about the exhibit.

"Hey," Suzette pointed toward the gift shop. "We can get Leonardo da Vinci tee-shirts and sweat shirts. Maybe they've got American Horse panties."

"Oh sure, and then I get in a bad accident and have to go to the hospital in my American Horse panties. The ghost of my mother would appear at my bedside and tell me how ashamed she was that the paramedics had seen me in American Horse underwear."

"Really?" Bless her heart, Suzette always took everything I had to say as gospel truth. "But, Erica, what about the time you told me you wore crotchless underwear to that party on Oxford street?"

"That was London, dearest. An English paramedic would've raised his eyebrows, but not said a thing," I reminded her as I opened my purse and fumbled for the Visa card.

"What if your paramedic had been a woman?"

"Then she probably would've rung up my mother," I answered. "C'mon, we're losing the light."

Naturally being twenty-four feet tall, the horse is not inside the main building. My fashionable boot heels crunched softly against the dry crystalline snow as it began to dust over the recently shoveled sidewalk leading to the horse. Where there was a dry spot on the concrete, my three inch heels clacked down brusquely. That sound echoed ahead, to the side, and behind. You know how it is when you walk through a quiet snowfall and you find yourself wanting to turn around to see who's following you?

A celestial reaper hidden in those bleak gray clouds continued to harvest a new crop of snow crystals and fling the dusty white chaff to the ground in a drifting pattern of blowing and swirling which almost looked like a waterfall of snow crystals floating down lazily but relentlessly from above.

"If we don't get to it soon," Suzette called out. "It'll be buried under a ton of snow."

I shook my head. "This wind should keep these flakes stirring around enough to see the horse okay."

"I can't believe my eyes and ears. If someone had told me that I'd be following you through the snow to see a horse, I'd have laughed in their face! What shape shifter has stolen your identity, Erica?"

"Don't be absurd, Suzette, this isn't a horse. It's a sculpture--a Leonardo da Vinci sculpture."

The difference in presentation between Milan and Grand Rapids is the placement of the Da Vinci Horse as well as the climate. In Milan

Il Cavallo

stands on raised base platform pedestal, so that it can be seen unencumbered by distant viewers and so that observers may walk respectfully around it. The

American Horse

stands on the concrete and a spectator may walk directly beneath it.

"Oh, my God! Look at it, Suzette!" I called out. "It's gorgeous."

There defying the blowing snow and windy weather, ignoring the wet and the cold, impervious to the impending dark and to approaching visitors stood Leonardo da Vinci's Horse casting number two. And all I could think of doing was to remove my gloves so that I could place my bare fingers upon its raw, chilling, brass patina of the lifted hoof. In a hundred years my finger oils could damage the patina, but I think not. There must be some sort of new cleaning and protecting chemical which they use to protect the plating from the vehicle emissions not five hundred yards away or the smoke of factories and smog.

Too high to touch more than just the points where its legs stretched up from the ground or where its lifted hoof held forever suspended, I walked in and around the horse just to experience the unusual views from directly beneath. The dimness of the season encroached upon us quickly, the roiling snows twisted and backdrafts of wind born flakes trapezed sidewise through the eddies and current of the air.

I walked to the left slowly taking in the massive expanse of the neck and shoulders extending skyward.

"Well, it's big," Suzette said, trying to hide her obvious annoyance that I was exploring its total visual splendor, while she stood inured to its immense charms. "It's certainly...big." Suzette watched me watch the horse for a few more long minutes. "May we go now?"

"Wait. I want to see it from here." No, go this way three steps. Split the difference back. Yes, I needed to stand right over...

Twenty feet above ground, the great nostril flared uneasily. It's bronze sheen cloaked by dim white flurries suddenly took on a chestnut and black hue a sheen of perspiration lathered its front flanks. Was that blood? "Erica, I'm cold," Suzette moaned, but I all I heard was a thunderous boom which covered her words.

Now I saw its huge wild eye blaze wide open rolling in the socket gripped in fear and terror.

"Did you hear me, Erica?"

The head moved, pulling back--nostrils mouth, eyes, ears and that massive skull began to toss from side to side.

"Erica?"

I saw its eye sockets redden and fill with blood. But I could not move.

"Erica!"

In slow motion the huge horse reared back, its massive hooves toppling straight down upon me. I collapsed to my knees in the snow.

"Erica?"

It was January 14th, and everything went black.

--------------

Santa Fe, New Mexico. Two weeks later.

Doctor Jacqueline Kennedy Greyeyes was born on November 26, 1963. Her mother, Helen, was all of seventeen years of age at the time, and had been listening to the nonstop news coverage of JFK's assassination right up to and including the riderless horse accompanying the coffin as it walked stoically down Constitution Avenue in Washington DC, when she finally went into labor. At the time the dead white president's well-known wife's name seemed a perfectly reasonable choice for Helen Greyeyes to call her beautiful black-haired infant daughter.

Doctor Jackie, as people loved to call her, sat calmly watching her patient fidget in anticipation of today's session. "I've listened to the entire recording twice since Tuesday's session, Erica. I want you to hear it. We won't have time to comment on it today, but I'd like you to experience the reality of your words from your own perspective. Next time we'll dig into it. Is that okay with you?"

"Sure," Erica answered. "Whatever you think is best, Doctor." Erica fixed her eyes on the electronic strobe which Doctor Jackie used to put her patients under hypnosis. It was modern, definitely state of the art, and probably sanctioned by the American Psychiatric Association. Still, Erica thought, given the right circumstances, would Doctor Jackie prefer to use fasting, sweat lodges and hallucinogens for her patients.

No. Probably not. I think I'm just perpetuating the stereotype.

Doctor Jackie had cued up the tape forward from the actual act of putting me under hypnosis last Tuesday.

"Erica, we're going back to last week. Back to January the fourteenth, do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand," the Erica on tape murmured.

"You're relaxed and warm, you're perfectly safe in that chair and you're in complete control of all of your faculties. Your body is loosely curled up on this couch and if you need to come back here at any time, we can do that. We're going back, Erica, back to the morning of January the fourteenth. You've just awakened on that snowy morning. What do you see?"

On the tape, Erica begins to laugh:

"Il faut