Word: aldebaran
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Once in the open again, Aldebaran is only too glad to marry the first man who offers her a steamship company as a wedding present. In this case there can be no complaint about the happy ending-it brings the book to a close some 700 pages sooner than its famous picaresque predecessor...
...Twilight on the Floods, Author Steen brought the family up to the late 19th century, and showed them ebbing into downright respectability. Now, in Jehovah Blues, she puts a short and almost dispirited postscript to the story; the Floods have evaporated to a small perfume-puddle of neurosis named Aldebaran...
...Poor Aldebaran Flood. She is beautiful (if one admires a face of "grey bone with a coral gash across it"), and she could paper Piccadilly with the receipts from her bestselling novel, Bells on Her Fingers. But Aldebaran is a child of fate-the "blood guilt" of her ancestors keeps "working itself out," and she "can't help being passionate about anything to do with colored people...
This includes jazz music and, in particular, a jazz musician she once slept with in Paris-one Lee Marion, who wrote a song called Jehovah Blues ("The beat . . . was a slow dripping of blood") and then headed back to the U.S. Aldebaran spends the greater part of the book in pursuit of Musician Marion, who quite evidently does not want her blood guilt dripping on him. Aldebaran realizes this only after she and Author Steen have floundered through the swamplands of the U.S. color question...
...neon signs glared garishly before such nightspots as Maxim's, Harry's Bar and the tinseled Kit Kat Club, where a burnished blonde from Budapest chanted defiantly: "Bingle, bangle, bungle, I'm so happy in the jungle, I refuse to go." In the black sky overhead, Aldebaran, Betelgeuse and Rigel blazed as brightly as they had centuries before when Arab herdsmen first gave them their names...