Authors: Anne Carlisle
In life, I was Cassandra
Vye, born Cassandra Zanelli in 1880. I come from a proud and ancient line of sirens in human form. Home base -- the Italian Alps.
Today I took my last breath of earthly air.
The Zanelli sirens are self-educating. By this I mean we are born not knowing what we are; along the way, we are home-schooled by our elders. We live and die as humans, as I have died today. But we are gifted with paranormal powers.
One way to recognize
us is by our extreme talents and numerous accolades. We aspire beyond the ordinary, and we live by a code of generosity and fair competition. In fact, we are encouraged to win our trophies without tricks, though we have several at our disposal.
Humans
love us for the beauty of our song, which is pure, unadulterated sex. Anyone listening to a siren with less than a perfectly pure heart is unable to resist her. Truly, we can charm a human male into doing our bidding or even lure him to his death, simply by singing to him. However, we prefer other methods that are more intensely pleasurable. In other words, we love sex, and we use it to further our ends. What is wrong with that? Admittedly, there are sometimes unintended consequences.
Besides achievement and a heat for love, a
nother way to recognize a siren is by her paraphernalia. Sirens always have a sacred object or two stashed away -- personal items associated with our powers -- and we are protective of them. My baroque zither is such a one.
The other
magical hand-me-down is deceptively modest: it is an old, faded traveling cloak. Our siren cloak was fashioned by a skilled weaver in the Italian Alps who gave it to my grandmother, Anna Zanelli, when she was a girl. The weaver was a demon and one of her many lovers. Over the years, the colors in the cloak have faded. Now it is more or less a muddy brown with a few yellow, blue, and green threads. However, the cloak's protective powers have only grown stronger with time.
The original
colors in the cloak represented how a siren's eyes appear through the lens of a human eye. Each of us has a jewel-toned eye color. My daughter Chloe's eyes are amber. Caesar tells me Dakota has topaz eyes, like mine. Marlena's are a new shade, an aquamarine like the Mediterranean Sea, which she got from her natural father, Gordon somebody. He was a comely Easterner my cousin Faith loved desperately, but she could not convince him to marry her in the Catholic Church. So Faith, the most practical of us all, married Austin Bellum and secretly saddled him with her love child, even got away with it. Fortunately for Faith, a siren's gestation term is ten months.
Cousin
Marlena has no idea her birth was illegitimate, as were those of my two children, Caesar Lawless and Chloe Vye. Faith gets to keep her dirty little secret intact, while I foresee that one day I will be required to make a full confession.
Chloe never admitted so to me
, but I suspect something went on between her and Austin Bellum before she handed him off to Faith, when all were together in San Diego during WWII. Chloe is nine years older than Faith and totally dissimilar in her tastes. But perhaps Austin was hung like a horse. Or maybe he had an eye for a siren's beauty. To some we appear odd; to others, irresistible. Austin is dead now, and unlike sirens, dead humans tell no tales, true or otherwise.
Occasionally sirens
marry and have children. But not often enough. Our line has dwindled to the point of near extinction. The youngest is Marlena, our redheaded hope for the future, but so far her six-year marriage to Codwell Dimmer has been fruitless.
Unlike the
sirens of the ancient world, modern sirens live quietly among ordinary humans as members of their species. As a rule, we mean well. Granted, it is difficult to resist one of us when we set our psychic will on a particular person, place, or thing. But, despite our special powers, we intend no harm. In fact, we are plagued with the same problems as ordinary mortals, only magnified. For instance, if we get tangled in our own webs and fall for one of our victims, there are usually bad results for everyone concerned. These are not entirely our fault, given our true nature. There is also a family curse, and every once in a while it rears its ugly head and comes after us.
The source of our true nature goes back much further than Alta, Wyoming, in 1900, when the curse was laid on us, or even the
tiny snowbound village of Alpa Pianni, high in the Italian Alps, where my siren grandmother was born. There was a sixteenth century courtesan/siren born in the Dolomites and even before that a druidical priestess in 505 A.D. The numbers 505 and the mountains have spelled power for us, as well as trouble, ever since.
Alpa
Pianni is even more remote than Alta. The first paved roads were built by Mussolini. As an only child, Anna Zanelli was home-schooled in the use of her siren powers by her grandmother, who in turn was educated by hers and so forth. Giovanni Ferrari and Anna Zanelli, my grandparents, were married when their first son was on the way. Anna was a most persuasive siren. For instance, when the couple came to America, she convinced her husband they should enter using her surname rather than Ferrari, as Zanelli was associated with Italian ice wine. (Sirens are willful; they are not always wise in their judgments.) In Alpa Pianni, the couple had prospered as winemakers. They even enjoyed an unprecedented monopoly on the local wine concession to the Catholic Church. As the story goes, the monsignor was obsessed by my grandmother, a voluptuous beauty with reddish-gold hair and a gift for provocative storytelling in the confessional.
When a rival winemaker (Anna's discarded
lover) set fire to the vineyards in a fit of jealous rage, my grandparents lost everything. Anna's adventurous spirit then carried our line forward through emigration. The couple landed in Saratoga Springs, New York, where Anna's cousin made a job available to Giovanni at his candy store. Their lives were good enough for them to raise their three children in the American way. They kept their religion pure but lost their native language, except for when they argued with each other. As the decades passed, the arguments iced into silence; Anna and her glum husband rarely spoke, neither in English nor Italian.
N
ot one of their children understood the native tongue, though all were well versed in the Latin responses at mass and Old Country superstitions. When it came to breeding viable heirs, they also showed a dismal record.
Their only daughter, Chloe, proved to be barren. I was the only offspring of the older son, Giovanni. My first cousin Faith, forty years younger than I, is the only surviving child of the younger, Tomas. Pious Tomas Zanelli, who had once planned to enter the priesthood, refused to allow the doctor to take his son's life to spare the mother, leaving it to “God's will;” mother and infant died. So there were only us two granddaughters to carry on the Zanelli siren heritage. Fortunately, both Faith and I were born sirens, though she has adamantly refused to acknowledge her heritage. To this day, cousin Faith is devoted to aligning her will to her Catholic God's, and her daughter's godless behavior in carrying on an adulterous affair has put Faith's head into a tailspin.
My
head, on the other hand, was always full of fancies about international travel, bright city lights, and the future. In my dresser were pictures cut from pictorial magazines of future Americans walking around with balloons attached to their sleeves that would lift them into the sky. In 1911, when an airship crossed the English Channel for the first time, I stayed out all night with friends to celebrate. But, I digress.
My father was twenty years older than Tomas and a wanderer.
Gio Zanelli set out as a teenager to conquer the American West with his voice, but his sole conquest was my mother, his former Saratoga neighbor and shy childhood sweetheart, Kate Vye. Gio Zanelli and Kate Vye wed one blustery afternoon before a traveling Justice of the Peace in Belle Fourche, Wyoming. The ceremony was followed in scandalously short order by my appearance; I had been in the womb for ten months, a siren's normal term.
Here is how my mother happened to be in the mountainous wilds of Wyoming instead of cozily blossoming into womanhood in the middle classes of Saratoga society, where Kate, a timid soul, would have much preferred to be.
After the Civil War, enticing pamphlets were circulating in the East about homesteading in the Wyoming Territory. One landed in the hands of my maternal grandmother, Mary Vye, a plain woman with a wild imagination. In her fiction-filled mind, as my grandfather would tell me decades later, the windy plains of Wyoming were the next best thing to the desolate moors of England where her favorite novels took place. She yearned to experience first-hand that kind of romantic setting, and her bachelor cousin was the owner of a goat ranch in Belle Fourche.
Mary's long-suffering husband, Captain Marcus
Vye, was a sea captain in the Merchant Marine out of Gloucester, Massachusetts. While he was away at sea one summer, Mary bundled up her romance novels and their young daughter Kate, and set out on the train for Wyoming. A year passed, and Mary Vye did not return East. A decade later, after my parents married, she moved to a cabin in Bulette, Wyoming. There she died in her sleep one night, the snow piled up past the window and a romance novel resting on her bosom.
When I was twelve, my mother and I journeyed on the train to visit our New York relatives. My father's sister, Chloe Raleigh, was a blithe spirit who doted on me. I had such a good time that I prevailed on mother to let me stay on for the summer. A month after Kate returned to Wyoming, her recurring illness was diagnosed as tuberculosis. My stay in Saratoga was further extended. Three years later, in the fall of 1895,
Gio told Kate that Buffalo Bill Cody was holding auditions at the Sheridan Inn for his Wild West Show. The next day, my father packed his suitcase and vanished for good. So, with my mother close to death and my father gone, Aunt Chloe said I was welcome to remain indefinitely in Saratoga Springs, and I was fairly content to do so.
The teenage years are a pivotal time in a siren's development. For six years I thrived in a gay environment of racing events, theatrical people, and handsome military men with whom I loved to dance and flirt. I attended the private girls' school where my uncle, Charles Raleigh, was bandmaster. I excelled far above the human girls in my studies and finished them at fifteen, without once resorting to siren tricks. I also acted in and wrote stage plays for a regional theater.
Annually I received a letter from my grandfather. Captain Vye had taken the long train ride west to visit the gravesites of his wife and daughter. There he fell in love with Wyoming's wide open spaces. The remoteness of the northeast corner reminded him of his life at sea. For his retirement he bought a former millhouse on a creek-side elevation near the tiny village of Alta. “My stone home,” he wrote me, “is like a sailing ship, upright amid blustering elements. One day I hope you will visit me at Mill's Creek.”
Eventually I proved myself to be my father's daughter. I became restless. As a blossoming siren, I was also preternaturally alive to the intricate sexual games men and women play. Aunt Chloe educated me, in fits and starts, about my siren nature. However, she never discussed sex. I was full of unspent sexual energy, and as a fifteen-year-old siren consumed with curiosity, I felt I had waited long enough. I decided I would lose my virginity to a
music teacher, forty-year-old Aldo LaRosa.
Aldo was jittery, with big, watery eyes and a thin, twitchy mustache. The Italian maestro had a regional reputation as a
ladies' man. Soon after arriving at Aunt Chloe's, I had picked up her old zither and played it expertly; I needed no lessons. But as Aldo seemed ideal for what I had in mind, I pretended to be an eager amateur. Uncle Charles arranged private zither lessons with LaRosa at a special rate through the girls' school.
After a few lessons at the maestro's
home (and on a day when his wife Giselle was on a monthly visit to her mother in Albany), I passed my final examination by demonstrating I could simultaneously play the zither, recite an opera script from memory, and bring my teacher quickly to climax. Our affair carried on undetected for three years. However, I never experienced the exquisite pleasure of a human orgasm, nor reached the deep well of tender emotions humans are capable of feeling. I longed to do so.
One day, when
I was standing and playing with nothing on except a cinch corset around my waist, Giselle appeared in the music room. She had arrived home from Albany and stepped in without knocking. Aldo's big false teeth were bared directly over the crack between my exposed buttocks. On his face was an idiotic smile. “You're home two days early, my dear,” Aldo observed. Giselle screamed and then promptly fainted.
Not only my
sense of danger but also my curiosity was keenly aroused. The ensuing uproar would surely endanger the security and esteem I had come to enjoy in my aunt's happy home, the first I had ever known. I was determined not to be the cause of shame for them. But what an opportunity to put my powers to the test! I decided I would repair the situation by making Giselle disbelieve what she had seen with her very own eyes.
Terrified, but also eager to see if willpower and cleverness could save the day,
I returned the next morning to the LaRosa household, which was in total disarray, the maestro having been banished. I sought out the wronged wife in her sewing room.