The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender(7)

As he ran through the shop-lined blocks toward his family’s apartment, he was followed by a growing crowd of women (and a few men), all wrought with hysteria over the sight of René Roux’s naked buttocks. The frenzy quickly escalated into a full-fledged riot that lasted four and a half days. Several kosher businesses were burned to the ground and three people were trampled to death, including tiny Mrs. Barnaby Callahoo. Bonsoir, Notre Petit Poulet.

Once the panic finally subsided, René’s lover sent a message to the Roux apartment, begging René to meet him at the docks along the Hudson River that night. The next morning the Roux family — what was left of them — awoke to find René’s body on their doorstep, a handkerchief covering the place where William Peyton had shot him in his handsome face.





IN THE MID-1920s, a small, inconsequential neighborhood sat in the blossoming city of Seattle, Washington. The neighborhood, some three thousand miles from Beauregard Roux’s Manhatine, was later overshadowed by the Fremont bohemians in the 1960s and was mostly remembered for the house that sat on the hill at the end of Pinnacle Lane. It was remembered because I lived in that house.

The house was painted the color of faded periwinkles. It had a white wraparound porch and an onion-domed turret. The second-floor bedrooms had giant bay windows. A widow’s walk rested on top of the house, its balcony turned toward Salmon Bay.

A Portuguese ship captain built the house in the late 1800s, its dollhouse charm inspired by a favorite childhood relic of his younger sister. Fatima Inês de Dores was still a child when, after the passing of both parents, she was sent to Seattle to live with her brother.

For many years neighbors could remember her tiny face on that day she arrived — her lips chapped and her thick dark brows partially hidden by the hood of her green cloak. They remembered with distaste how her brother’s face flushed with desire and how his fingers burned red as he helped her down from the carriage.

Throughout the months her brother was at sea, Fatima Inês lived less like a child and more as a woman awaiting the return of a husband or lover. She never left the house, refusing to attend school with other children her age. She spent her days on the roof of the house with the doves she kept as pets. Wrapped in her hooded green cloak, she watched the sea from the widow’s walk until forced inside by the dark-skinned housemaid, who cooked the child’s meals and prepared her for bed.

In the spring, when the captain returned home from long voyages at sea, he brought his sister elaborate gifts: a hand-carved marionette from Italy with leather boots and a metal sword; a domino set made of ivory and ebony; a cribbage board etched into a walrus tusk bartered from the Eskimos; and, always, a bundle of purple lilacs.

Throughout his stay, the purple blooms scented the air with their heady perfume, and the house was said to pulse with an eerie golden hue at night. Years later, even after the ship captain and his sister no longer lived in the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane, the smell of lilacs could send impious ripples through the neighborhood.

During those spring months, the church pews were unusually full.

The entire neighborhood was built with little Fatima Inês in mind. Captain de Dores was the benefactor behind the post office, where he sent his younger sister packages from other ports. And he helped fund the elementary school, even after Fatima refused to attend.

Following a rather peculiar incident involving the priest from the nearest Catholic parish, Fatima Inês was also the reason they built the Lutheran church. At his sister’s request, Captain de Dores had arranged for a visit from a priest to administer her First Communion. He commissioned a local seamstress to make her dress — a long white gown with tiny buttons up the back and a veil trimmed with pearls. He had the house filled with white roses for the occasion, and the petals from the blooms caught in Fatima’s lace train when she walked.

When the priest set the host upon the rose of the young Fatima Inês’s tongue, however, the holy wafer burst into flame.

Or so the story goes.

The priest refused ever to return to the house at the end of Pinnacle Lane. A few months later, the new Lutheran church was holding its first service.

The captain’s only request, if the neighborhood wanted the patronage to continue, was a yearly public celebration of Fatima’s birthday on the summer solstice.

No one knew what to expect the first year. And then the gold-embossed carriages of emerald green, fuchsia, and tangerine appeared on the dirt path leading up Pinnacle Lane. Driven by small men in blue satin top hats and pulled by dappled ponies, the carriages were windowless except for the last. Through its windows the gathering neighbors caught a glimpse of the ringmaster and the contortionist twins of Nova Scotia. The impossible postures on display by all turned out to be the most talked-about part of the entire celebration, even after the elephants arrived.

The celebrations grew all the more lavish and indulgent as the years went by: there were acrobats shipped in from China for Fatima’s tenth birthday; a gypsy woman with wrinkled hands and a crystal ball when she turned eleven; white tigers that lapped up giant bowls of cream when she turned twelve. The summer solstice soon became a holiday that was anticipated with as much excitement as Christmas or the Fourth of July, with attendants arriving from miles away to dance around the bonfire with white daisies woven in their hair.

Fatima never attended the event herself. Occasionally someone — drunk on wishful thinking and mead — would insist that they saw her cloaked form perched on the roof with her birds, watching the festivities below with interest.