Despite the fact that citizens had twice voted against it, the mayor had just granted a license to MGM to build a casino in Detroit, and Mrs. O’Leary said she’d be damned to hell and roasted crisp before she sat back and let them build.
“They’re all crooked,” she’d said, the Free Press and Detroit Monthly spread across the table before her. “Politicians steal our money and give it to these greed mongers. This one’s mother died, this one’s wife’s having an affair. What do they care as long as they can build their casino? Come here and look at what they’re doing to your city.” She made me read about the latest political graft or look at the smug grin of a socialite newly arrived on Detroit’s small glamour circuit. “Look at that,” she’d say, poking her chubby finger into the face of the offender, her tone bursting with rancor. Sometimes I’d see her pull out the White Pages, address an envelope in her looping cursive, and drop her business card inside, and I’d wonder who was on the receiving end of her selective advertising. But she wrote many letters: to her family back in Cork, to the newspapers, to watchdog groups, to the mayor’s office. Though I was young, my future not necessarily tied to Corktown, even I understood her anger over its recent state, her worry over the fate of her business. Mrs. O’Leary, for her part, was convinced that if the MGM people knew how desperate the people of Detroit were — Who’s going to put fifty dollars down on a blackjack table? They’ll come in and rob the place, that’s what they’ll do! — they would thank the mayor kindly and be on their way.
“Go read their tarot,” I said. “Tell them they’ll be sorry.”
“You can laugh,” she countered, “but these businessmen wouldn’t bring their families here if they knew how dangerous it was. They wouldn’t want to open a casino if something happened to stop them. And this is a place where bad things happen.” I laughed at her naïveté, for I wasn’t too young to know that there’s no stopping the push of capitalism. Actually, the casino was just the latest impediment in her drive to save Detroit: She was working to have Archer impeached, the new Tiger Stadium — she would not say the words “Comerica Park” — boycotted, and Mike Ilitch run out on a rail.
This is the history of the story I’m trying to tell you, the thing that happened in the tearoom, the thing that I can tell you now that Mrs. O’Leary is dead. All that fear and sadness drove Mrs. O’Leary to do what she did, but who’s to say that under similar pressure you wouldn’t have done the same thing?
It should not surprise you, then, that he appeared before us on a desperate night, for there were many desperate nights in Corktown after the close of the ’99 season. Perhaps I should have taken as portents what I dismissed simply as the manifestations of a dying city as I walked to work that day: a man running down Trumbull with a pair of crutches under his arm, a woman pushing a baby stroller full of empty bottles, a car without a passenger door cruising slowly up Leverette. That night the sleet was driving down, little needles piercing the gray snow below, and even though the tart smell of cabbage was making me queasy, the drone of the rain and the six-block walk home kept me there long after I should have left, flipping cards in a Hearts and Spades game against my employer. We were on display at Mrs. O’Leary’s favorite linen-covered table in the front window of the tearoom, which always made me feel like a target at night, but Mrs. O’Leary seemed oblivious to the paranoia of a fearful mind. Is it an indictment of Mrs. O’Leary’s psychic ability to say that when the doorbell chimed we both gasped? Why? Because we hadn’t expected anyone, of course; we couldn’t imagine anyone strolling around in the knifelike torrent. But there he was.
The man who stood before us looked as if he’d just walked out of a movie — chiseled features, dripping trench coat, brown fedora. We stared at him, and Mrs. O’Leary said, “I’ll get the tea.”
“That’s all right,” he said. “I don’t need any tea.”
“Yes you do,” she said. “Sit down.”
The man — he couldn’t have known, the cards weren’t out — sat at the tarot table, far from the dark front windows. “My car broke down on Bagley,” he said as Mrs. O’Leary placed a teacup before him, and by the way she smiled, showing only the lower left corner of her blackened tooth, I knew she didn’t believe him. Though she had a stockpot of food warming in the kitchen, she never offered him any — do you see what I mean about the way she knew things?
The man took a small sip of his tea and smiled. Later I’d learn that she’d put two fingers of Ballantine’s in his cup, that she knew he needed it, and you didn’t have to be a psychic to see that he was thankful. Mrs. O’Leary nodded at me, as if we’d earlier set up a system of communication that would tell me exactly what to do, but my psychic abilities, as usual, failed. Though she’d been teaching me the tarot for two months, I still struggled. I knew the meaning of the cards — I’d memorized them as easily as I’d mentally charted who owned each car in the Trumbull lot — but when I had to transplant their meanings into the lives of the people who sat before me, their fear and exhilaration always seemed to short circuit my intuition. She nodded again, then turned to the man, who had removed his hat to reveal a thick head of red-blond hair, and said, “Why don’t you have your tarot read while you wait?”
He looked at her expectantly, as if that is precisely why he’d come, as if she’d read his mind. I recall thinking that I had read his mind too, just then, that my skills had kicked in, that my intuitive antennae were finally picking up signals from the psychic airwaves around me. I was suddenly convinced that he had come to us deliberately, desperately, and I knew then that I would be the one to save this poor soul, this gorgeous man. Is arrogance not the downfall of the fool? Before Mrs. O’Leary could stand up, I had stationed myself across from him and pulled the tarot pack from its green silk pouch. That she believed me incapable of doing any real harm seemed clear when she poured herself three fingers of Ballantine’s and embarked on a game of solitaire at the small table where she had been winning all night. Perhaps that was yet another missed sign?
“All right, then,” I said to the man before turning on the tape recorder. “For five dollars you can buy a cassette of the reading.” This was something the rich ladies loved, for they’d often repeat the same questions, their recall apparently faulty.
Mrs. O’Leary, her back to us, sighed heavily and shook her head, and the man stared at me like I was insane. He then shrugged and draped his wet coat over a vacant chair beside us, and I imagined I could smell the taunting rain and bitter smoke in its folds, fear seeping into my nostrils like ammonia. I started turning cards immediately after he’d cut them, eager, too eager, I see now, to test my newfound skills.
The first card was the two of Wands, a lone, lost man with his back turned, the card of mortification. This card meant that the man before me had received news, bad news. Next came the Empress, crowned in stars and robed in gold, signaling his involvement with a strong, wealthy woman, but isn’t that common amongst handsome men? At any rate, I turned the third card, a reversed Ace of Pentacles, a gargantuan hand clutching an oversized coin and symbolizing the dark side of wealth.
“You’ve had some bad luck,” I said, hoping for some type of acknowledgment from him, but he was like a stone.
I turned more cards: The four of Cups, an inconsolable man, then the two of Pentacles: fear, obstacles, romantic entanglement.
“There is a woman,” I said. “She is raven-haired. She is powerful. She is tormented.” Of course, I didn’t know for certain that the woman in charge of his troubles was raven-haired — only Mrs. O’Leary would know that — but I think it was a safe bet that a woman was at the root of his unhappiness, for my father had always said a woman is at the root of most men’s unhappiness, and I pretty much had a one-in-four shot at getting hair color right.