Her mother did not return, but the following morning, by pressing her ears to the closed doors of her parents’ bedroom, she heard her mother say, “... not divorce you, not over my dead body... not after all that I have... for you... and Meera Meera Johna...” (Meera Meera Johna was both pleased and frightened, and felt oddly guilty, to have been mentioned.) “And I want to know what your relationship... Lady Oswald... No wonder Sir Oswald... Sir Oswald should have... you... I will... you suffer... will have to live with me for the rest of your life.” Meera Meera Johna ate breakfast alone, and then she went out into the yard with her butterfly net in the hope of catching, not her father, but her mother, one big blue butterfly.
Mee Mee Jo, as Brooklynites Vishala, Ursela, Tanya, Susana, Rhonda, etc., called her, was in a most delightful and, so, unfortunate position when she received the first call from her mother telling her that her father had, as she had long worried might happen, succumbed to the effects of breathing in an excess of chloroform.
On pulling Vishala’s lavender-colored spandex strapless top up over Vishala’s head in a hot and flustered state, it occurred to her that she could use the stretchy thing to tie Vishala’s hands together, so she did just that as Vishala made a brilliant show of mock protest, flinging her head from side to side, and wincing, begging for forgiveness. Mee Mee Jo then reached under the lined polyester skirt to find that Vishala had worn no underwear. This so excited Mee Mee Jo she put her mouth to Vishala’s and kissed her softly in gratitude. Then she held the top of Vishala’s skirt and pulled it down and down, side by side, and the hand-tied Vishala struggled slightly even as she lifted herself to make the removal easy, and Mee Mee Jo, having got the thing down, used it to tie the feet of her gorgeous prey who kept on whispering pleasepleaseplease and uhuh uhuh uhuh. Mee Mee Jo lay her naked body on top of her Vishala, grabbed a handful of her long and wavy hair, and held it just tight enough to give the impression of brute force, even as one of the fingers of that same hand stroked Vishala’s face in tenderness, and when Mee Mee Jo placed her hand, hard and stiff, on Vishala’s neck, Vishala gave a cry of pleading and desire all at once, and Mee Mee Jo’s entire body was seized by a raging desire of her own. She achingly, slowly lowered her pelvis toward Vishala’s, Vishala’s thrust upward impatiently wanting, and was about to flick herself at her prey when the phone rang. She would not have answered had it not been for the special ring assigned to her mother.
What Matilda Jasodhra didn’t tell her daughter was that the police were about to take her into their vehicle to transport her to police headquarters to find out why certain articles of her clothing were drenched in the deathly sweetness of chloroform, and why John Lucknow (ill-luck then, really) Mansing had cotton fibers in his lungs, and markings of chloroform about his nose and mouth, and just as she was lifting a leg into the vehicle — the yardman trying desperately and in vain to insist that his madam was innocent of everything on earth, so desperately that he had to be restrained — the detective in charge received a call on his cell phone, and after speaking for ten seconds with him and ten with the forensic doctor, she was let go. Oswald Jones, now an old man who had long ago divorced his wife and who, after an initiative led by him in Parliament, was appointed President For Life, had himself, himveryself, telephoned — no one questioned how he might have known of certain details of the current situation, but his foresight in many matters had long been recognized and heralded — and the case was post-haste slammed shut.
What she did tell her daughter was that the newspaper headlines the day after her husband’s, her father’s, death read, Butterfly Killer’s Death Ruled, a Case of Nature’s Revenge. Ignoring the typo, she quoted over the telephone, Yesterday morning southern jeweler and amateur lepidopterist John Lucknow Mansing, eighty years of age, fell asleep on a wad of chloroform-soaked cotton intended for live butterflies, and immediately got on with the business of focusing on dangers associated with butterfly keeping in particular and with animal-related hobbies in general.
Meera Meera Johna Mansing flew to Trinidad in time for her father’s funeral, and to clean up the butterfly mess in his study. There was not to be found there a single one of the beautiful Morphos she had been so proud as a child to net her father. Oh well, she thought, how like him.
The funeral service itself, at the Grant Monorail Presbyterian Church, was a gathering of mostly women, all of whom were divorced or had separated from their husbands, three-quarters of whom wore silver necklaces, or earrings, or rings on their fingers, or belts around their waists, and — it was Meera Meera Johna who first noticed — on some part of the surface of every piece of silver at that funeral was embedded bits of blue Morpho wings, in patterns that varied from flower-like shapes and waves of an ocean to scales of a fish or a snake. There at the front, in spitting distance from Matilda Jasodhra Mansing, was Isabella Tatiana, winking and smiling still at Meera Meera Johna, sporting in her old age a slight Cha cha cha tremble, and Meera Meera Johna noticed that even in her wrinkled skin, That Tatiana Woman was as beautiful as forty or so years ago. And there was Lady Oswald, but not, of course, Sir Oswald, from whom she was long ago divorced, stern and upright as ever, a scowl growing on her face as it began to dawn on her that she was not the only silver-and-Morpho wearer.
The dawning was gradual, but soon each woman who thought she had at one time been one of only two women in John Lucknow Mansing’s life — and of those two believed what she had been told, that she was the brighter — realized that she was simply one of many. The acoustics being what they were, the vocals inside Grant Monorail Presbyterian began to sound like the staging of an impromptu experimental piece of choral music, a concerto of staccato sotto voce gasps: arching whimpers, a strumming of tenor realizations crescendoing to full-blown wails, tremolo growls and soprano screams in a multitude of pitches. When the pastor left his podium and ran down to console the confused and enraged ad hoc choir, Matilda Jasodhra soared like a Venus, the Venus of San Fernando, to the pulpit to see better. From there, the casket of her husband — of these women’s lover — not an arm’s length from her, she waved her walking cane as if the choir’s winged conductor, pointing at one woman after the other, and it was to her delight that whichever woman she pointed to complied with her conductor’s command and wailed or hissed or growled appropriately. When the inevitable fight broke out, she banged her cane in glee on the casket, but wigs were already being pulled off, clumps of real hair flung in the air, and shoes, some with dangerously pointed heels, were being hurled. Jewelry was being yanked from necks and ears, and rings torn off fingers. Suddenly, the swarm of women, as if all at once, came to a slow realization. They all together ceased their fighting. There was silence. And then the ominous growl, and seconds before the move occurred — one knew it was coming, it was bound to happen — every woman, save for John Lucknow Mansing’s wife and daughter, charged toward the casket. The pastor, adding a baritone drone to the affair, fled when the lid was torn right off. He didn’t, therefore, lucky for him, see the devastation to John Lucknow (ill-luck now, really) Mansing. It was unpleasant and messy.