Lasher

Four

ONE HOUR UNTIL Ash Wednesday. All was quiet in the small house on the Gulf with its many doors open to the white beach. The stars hung low over the distant dark horizon, a mere stroke of light between heaven and sea. The soft wind swept through the small rooms of the house, beneath the low ceilings, bringing a tropical freshness to every nook and cranny, though the little house itself was cold.

Gifford didn’t care. Bundled in a long huge Shetland wool turtleneck, and legs snug in wool stockings, she enjoyed the chill of the breeze as much as the fierce and specific heat coming from the busy fire. The cold, the smell of the water, the smell of the fire-all of it was Florida in winter for Gifford, her hideaway, her refuge, her safe place to be.

She lay on the couch opposite the hearth, staring at the white ceiling, watching the play of the light on it, and wondering in a passive, uncurious sort of way, what it was about Destin that made her so happy-why it had always been such a perfect escape from the perpetual gloom of her life at home. She’d inherited this little beach house from her Great-grandmother Dorothy, on her father’s side, and over the years, she had spent her most contented moments here.

Gifford wasn’t happy now, however. She was only less miserable than she would have been if she had stayed in New Orleans for Mardi Gras, and she knew it. She knew this misery. She knew this tension. And she knew that she could not have gone to the old First Street house on Mardi Gras, no matter how much she might have wanted to, or how guilty she felt for running away.

Mardi Gras in Destin, Florida. Might as well have been any day of the year. Clean and quiet, and removed from all the ugliness of the parades, the crowds, the garbage littering St. Charles Avenue, the relatives drinking and arguing, and her beloved husband, Ryan, carrying on as if Rowan Mayfair had not run away and left her husband, Michael Curry, as if there had not been some sort of bloody struggle on Christmas Day at First Street, as if everything could be smoothed over and tightened up, and reinforced by a series of careful legal pronouncements and predictions, when in fact, everything was falling apart.

Michael Curry had nearly died on Christmas. No one knew what had happened to Rowan. It was all too awful, and everyone knew it, yet everyone wanted to gather on Mardi Gras Day at First Street. Well, they would have to tell Gifford how it went.

Of course the great Mayfair legacy itself was in no real danger. Gifford’s mountainous trust funds were in no real danger. It was the Mayfair State of Mind that was threatened-the collective spirit of some six hundred local Mayfairs, some triple and quadruple cousins of each other, who had been lifted to the heights recently by the marriage of Rowan Mayfair, the new heiress of the legacy, and then dashed to the rocks of hell by her sudden defection, and the obvious sufferings of Michael Curry, who was still recovering from the heart attack he’d suffered on December 25th. Poor Michael. He had aged ten years in the month of January, as far as Gifford was concerned.

Gathering this Mardi Gras Day at the house had been an act, not of faith, but of desperation-of trying to hold to an optimism and excitement which in one afternoon of horror had become impossible to maintain. And what a dreadful thing they had all done to Michael. Didn’t anyone care what the man felt? Imagine. Surrounding him with Rowan’s family as if it were just business as usual, when Rowan had gone. The whole thing was typical Mayfair-bad judgment, bad manners, bad morals-all disguised as some sort of lofty family activity or celebration.

I wasn’t born a human being, I was born a Mayfair, Gifford thought. And I married a Mayfair, and I have given birth to Mayfairs; and I shall die a Mayfair death no doubt, and they will pile into the funeral parlor, Weeping in Mayfair style, and what will my life have been? This was often Gifford’s thought of late, but the disappearance of Rowan had driven her nearly to the brink. How much could she take? Why had she not warned Michael and Rowan not to marry, not to live in that house, not even to remain in New Orleans?

Also there was the whole question of Mayfair Medical-the giant neuro-research complex which Rowan had been master-minding before her departure, a venture which had elicited enthusiasm from hundreds of family members, especially Gifford’s eldest and favorite son, Pierce, who was now heartbroken that the medical center along with everything else pertaining to Rowan was on indefinite hold. Shelby was also crushed, though being in law school still, she’d never been so involved; and even Lilia, Gifford’s youngest and most estranged, at Oxford now, who had written home to say they must-at all costs-go on with the medical center.

Gifford felt a sudden tensing all over, as once again she put it all together, only to be frightened by the picture and convinced that something had to be discovered, revealed, done!

And then there was Michael’s ultimate fate. What was it to be? He was recovering, so they said. But how could they tell Michael how bad things really were without causing him a setback? Michael could suffer another heart attack, one which might be fatal.

So the Mayfair legacy has destroyed another innocent male, Gifford thought bitterly. It’s no wonder we all marry our cousins; we don’t want to bring in the innocents. When you marry a Mayfair, you should be a Mayfair. You have lots of blood on your hands.

As for the idea that Rowan was in real danger, that Rowan had been forced somehow to leave on Christmas Day, that something might have happened to her-that was almost too terrible a thought for Gifford to bear. Yet Gifford was pretty sure something had happened to Rowan. Something really bad. They could all feel it. Mona could feel it, and when Gifford’s niece, Mona, felt something you had to pay attention. Mona had never been a melodramatic, bragging Mayfair, claiming to see ghosts on the St. Charles streetcar. Mona had said last week she didn’t think anybody should bank on Rowan coming back, that if they wanted the medical center, they ought to go ahead without her.

And to think, Gifford smiled to herself, that the august firm of Mayfair and Mayfair, representing Mayfair ad infinitum, stops to listen when a thirteen-year-old speaks. But it was true.

Gifford’s biggest secret regret was that she had not connected Rowan with Mona while there had been time. Maybe Mona would have sensed something and spoken up. But then Gifford had so many regrets. Sometimes it seemed to her that her entire life was a great sighing regret. Beneath the lovely surface of her picture-book Metairie home, her gorgeous children, her handsome husband, and her own subdued southern style, was nothing but regret, as if her life had been built atop a great and secret dungeon.

She was just waiting to hear the news. Rowan dead. And for the first time in hundreds of years, no designee for the legacy. Ah, the legacy, and now that she had read Aaron Lightner’s long account, how would she ever feel the same way about the legacy? Where was the precious emerald, she wondered? Surely her efficient husband, Ryan, had stashed it in an appropriate vault. That was where he should have stashed that awful “history.” She could never forgive him for letting it slip into Mona’s hands, that long Talamasca discussion of generations of witchcraft.

Maybe Rowan had run away with the emerald. Oh, that made her realize something else, just one of those minor-league regrets-! She’d forgotten to send the medal to Michael.

She’d found the medal out by the pool only two days after Christmas, while the detectives and the coroner’s office were making all their tests inside the house, and while Aaron Lightner and that strange colleague of his, Erich Somethingorother, were gathering specimens of the blood that stained the wails and the carpets.

“You realize they will write all this in that file?” Gifford had protested, but Ryan had let these men proceed. It was Lightner. Everyone trusted him. Indeed Beatrice was in love with him. Gifford wouldn’t be surprised if Beatrice married him.

The medal was St. Michael the Archangel. A gorgeous old silver medal on a broken chain. She’d slipped it into her purse, and meant a thousand times to send it to him-after he came home from the hospital of course, so as not to upset him. Well, she should have given it to Ryan before she left. But then again, who knew? Maybe he’d been wearing that medal on Christmas Day, when he’d nearly drowned in the pool. Poor Michael.

The logs in the fire shifted noisily and the mellow soothing light flared on the plain sloped ceiling. It made Gifford aware of how very quiet the surf was and had been all day. Sometimes the surf died to absolutely nothing on the Gulf of Mexico. She wondered if that could happen on the ocean. She loved the sound of the waves, actually. She wished they were roaring away out there in the dark, as if the Gulf were threatening to invade the land. As if nature were lashing back at the beach houses and the condominiums and the trailer parks, reminding them that they might be wiped off the smooth sandy face of the earth at any minute, should a hurricane or a tidal wave come. And certainly those things would inevitably come.

Gifford liked that idea. She could always sleep well when the waves were fierce and rapid. Her dreads and miseries didn’t stem from the fear of anything natural. They came from legends, and secrets, and tales of the family’s past. She loved her little house on account of its fragility, that a storm would most surely fold it up like a pack of cards.

This afternoon she had walked several miles south to inspect the house bought so recently by Michael and Rowan, a high contemporary structure built as it ought to be built-on pilings, and looking down upon a deserted sweep of beach. No sign of life there, but what had she expected?

She’d wandered back, heavily depressed by the mere sight of the place-how Rowan and Michael had loved it; they’d gone there on their honeymoon-and glad that her own little house was low and old and hidden behind a small and insignificant little dune, the way you couldn’t and shouldn’t build them today. She loved its privacy, its intimacy with the beach and the water. She loved that she could walk out her doors, and up three steps and along her boardwalk, and then down and out across the sand to the lip of the sea.

And the Gulf was the sea. Noisy or quiet, it was the sea. The great and endless open sea. The Gulf was the entire southern horizon. This might as well have been the end of the world.

One hour more and then it would be Ash Wednesday; she waited as if waiting for the witching hour, tense and resentful of Mardi Gras, a festival which had never made her particularly happy and always involved far more than she could endure.

She wanted to be awake when it was over; she wanted to feel Lent come on, as if the temperature itself would change. Earlier she’d built up the fire, and slumped down on the couch, merely to think away the hours, as if working on something, counting the minutes, feeling guilty naturally, for not going to First Street, for not having done all sorts of things to try to prevent this disaster, and then tensing with resentment against those who always tried to stop her from implementing her good intentions, those who seemed unable to distinguish between the real and imagined threat, and dismissed everything Gifford said out of hand.

Should have warned Michael Curry, she thought. Should have warned Rowan Mayfair. But they had read that tale. They should have known! Nobody could be happy in that First Street house. Fixing it up, that was sheer nonsense. The evil in that house lived in every brick and every bit of mortar; thirteen witches; and to think, all those old possessions of Julien’s were up in the attic. The evil lived in those things; it lived in the plaster ceilings, and under the porches and eaves, like bees’ nests hidden in the capitals of the Corinthian columns. That house had no hope, no future. And Gifford had known it all her life.

She hadn’t needed these Talamasca scholars from Amsterdam to tell her. She knew.

She’d known it when she’d first gone to First Street-a little girl with her beloved grandmother Ancient Evelyn, who was even then called Ancient because she was already old, and there were several young Evelyns then-one married to Charles Mayfair and another to Bryce-though whatever became of them, she couldn’t now remember.

She and Ancient Evelyn had gone to First Street, to visit Aunt Carl and poor doomed Deirdre Mayfair, the heiress in her rocking-chair throne. Gifford had seen the famous ghost of First Street-clearly and distinctly-a male figure standing behind Deirdre’s chair. Ancient Evelyn had seen it too, no doubt in Gifford’s mind. And Aunt Carlotta, that steely, cold and vicious Aunt Carlotta, had chatted with them in the dreary parlor as if there were no ghost there at all.

As for Deirdre, she had been already catatonic. “Poor child,” Ancient Evelyn had said. “Julien foresaw everything.” That was one of those statements Ancient Evelyn always refused to explain, though she often repeated it. And later, to her little granddaughter Gifford: “Deirdre’s known all the sorrow and never knew the fun of being one of us.”

“There was fun?” Gifford wondered about that now, as she had wondered then. What did Ancient Evelyn mean by fun? Gifford suspected she knew. It was all recorded in those old photographs of her with Oncle Julien. Julien and Evelyn in the Stutz Bearcat on a summer day, in white coats and goggles. Julien and Evelyn under the oaks at Audubon Park; Julien and Evelyn in Julien’s third-floor room. And then there was the decade after Julien’s death, when Evelyn had gone away with Stella to Europe, and they had had their “affair,” of which Evelyn spoke with great solemnity.

In Gilford’s early years, before Ancient Evelyn had gone silent, Ancient Evelyn had always been willing to tell those tales in a whispered but steady voice-of how Julien had bedded her when she was thirteen, of how he’d come up to Amelia Street, and cried from the sidewalk, “Evelyn, come down, come down!” and forced Evelyn’s grandfather Walker to let her loose from the attic bedroom where he had locked her up.

Bad bad blood between Julien and Evelyn’s grandfather-going way back to a murder at Riverbend when Julien was a boy, and a gun had gone off by accident, killing his cousin Augustin. The grandson of Augustin swore hate for the man who had shot his ancestor, though all were ancestors of everyone involved in some way or another. Tangle, tangle. Family trees of the Mayfair clan were like the thorny vines that choked off the windows and doors of Sleeping Beauty’s castle.

And to think, Mona was working it all out on her computer, and had only recently made the proud announcement that she had more lines of descent from Julien, and from Angélique, than anyone. Not to mention the lines feeding in from the old Mayfairs of Saint-Domingue. It made Gifford dizzy and sad, and she wished Mona would go for boys her own age, and care a little about clothes, and stop this obsession with family, and computers, and race cars, and guns.

“Doesn’t it teach you something about guns?” Gifford had demanded. “This huge rift between us and the Mayfairs of First Street? All happened on account of a gun.”

But there was no stopping Mona’s obsessions, large or small. She had dragged Gifford five times to a miserable little shooting gallery across the river just so they both could learn how to shoot their big noisy.38s. It was enough to make Gifford go mad. But better to be with Mona than to worry what Mona was doing on her own.

And to think, Ryan had approved of it. Made Gifford keep a gun after that in her glove compartment. Made her bring a gun to this house.

There was so much for Mona to learn. Had Ancient Evelyn ever told Mona those old tales? Now and then Ancient Evelyn emerged from her silence. And her voice was still her voice, and she could still begin her chant, like the elder of a tribe giving forth the oral history:

“I would have died in that attic had it not been for Julien-mad and mute, and white as a plant that has never seen sun. Julien got me with child and that was your mother, poor thing that she became.”

“But why, why did Oncle Julien do it with a girl so young?” Gifford had asked only once, so great was the thunder in response:

“Be proud of your Mayfair blood. Be proud. Julien foresaw everything. The legacy line was losing his strength. And I loved Julien. And Julien loved me. Don’t seek to understand those people-Julien and Mary Beth and Cortland-for then there were giants in the earth which there are not now.”

Giants in the earth. Cortland, Julien’s own son, had been Ancient Evelyn’s father, though Ancient Evelyn would never admit it! And Laura Lee, Julien’s child! Dear God, Gilford couldn’t even keep track of the lines unless she took a pen and paper and traced them out, and that she frankly never wanted to do. Giants in the earth! More truly devils from hell.

“Oh, how perfectly delicious,” Alicia had said, listening gleefully and always ready to mock Gifford and her fears. “Go on, Ancient Evelyn, what happened then? Tell us about Stella.”

Alicia had already been a drunk by the age of thirteen. She had looked old for her age, though thin and slight like Gifford. She’d gone into barrooms downtown and drunk with strange men, and then Granddaddy Fielding had “fixed her up” with Patrick just to get some control of her. Patrick, of all the cousins. A horrid idea, though he hadn’t seemed so bad in himself back then.

This is my blood, all these people, Gifford thought. This is my sister, married to her double or triple cousin, Patrick, whatever he is. Well, one thing can be said for sure. Mona is no idiot. Inbred, yes, child of an alcoholic, yes, but except for being rather “petite,” as they said of short girls in the South, she was on every count a winner.

Probably the prettiest of that entire generation of Mayfairs far and wide, and surely the most intelligent and the most reckless and belligerent, though Gifford could not stop loving Mona no matter what Mona did. She had to smile when she thought of Mona firing that gun in the shooting gallery and shouting to her over the earplugs: “Come on, Aunt Gifford, you never know when you might have to use it. Come on, both hands.”

Even Mona’s sexual maturity-this mad idea that she must know many men, which had Gifford frantic-was part of her precocity. And Gifford had to admit, protective though she was, she feared for the men who caught Mona’s attention. Heartless Mona. Something hideous had happened with old Randall for instance, Mona seducing him almost certainly, and then losing interest in the entire venture, but Gifford could get no straight answers out of anyone. Certainly not Randall, who went into an apoplectic fit at the mention of Mona’s name, denying that he would “harm a fly,” let alone a child, et cetera. As if they were going to send him to prison!

And to think the Talamasca with all their scholarship knew nothing about Mona; knew nothing about Ancient Evelyn and Oncle Julien. Knew nothing about the one little girl in this day and age who might be a real witch, no joke.

It gave Gifford a confusing, almost embarrassing, satisfaction to think of it. That the Talamasca did not know any more than the family did why Julien had shot Augustin, or what Julien was about and why he had left so many illegitimate children behind him?

Ah, but most of that Talamasca history had been quite impossible to accept. A ghost was one thing; a spirit that-Ah, it was all too distasteful to Gifford. She had refused to let Ryan circulate the document. It was bad enough that he and Lauren and Randall had read the thing, and that Mona, of all people, Mona had snatched up the file off his desk and read it in its entirety before anyone knew what had happened.

But the thing about Mona was this: she did know reality from fantasy. Alicia didn’t. That’s why she drank. Most Mayfairs didn’t. Ryan, Gifford’s husband, didn’t. In his refusal to believe in anything supernatural or inherently evil, he was as unrealistic as an old voodoo queen who sees spirits everywhere.

But Mona had a mind. Even when she called Gifford last year to announce that she, Mona Mayfair, was no longer a virgin, and that the actual moment of deflowering had been unimportant but the change in her outlook was the most important thing in the world, she had made it a point to add: “I’m taking the pill, Aunt Gifford; and I have an agenda. It has to do with discovery, experience, drinking from the cup, you know, all the things Ancient Evelyn used to say. But I am very health-conscious.”

“Do you know right from wrong, Mona?” Gifford had asked, overwhelmed, and in her deep secret heart even a little envious. Gifford had already begun to cry.

“Yes, I do, Aunt Gifford, and you know I do. And for the record, I’ve made the Honor Roll again. I just cleaned up the house. And I managed to make Mom and Dad both eat dinner before they started their nightly party. Everything is nice and quiet up here. Ancient Evelyn spoke today. She said she wanted to sit on the porch and watch the streetcars pass. So don’t worry. I’ve got everything covered.”

Everything covered! And then there was Mona’s strange admission to Pierce, surely a calculated lie, “Look, I like having them drunk all the time. I mean I wish they were living human beings and all, and that they weren’t drinking themselves right into the grave before my eyes, but hell, I have plenty of freedom. I can’t stand it when meddlesome cousins come over here and start asking me what my bedtime is, or if I’ve done my homework. I walk all over town. Nobody bugs me.”

Pierce had been so amused. Pierce adored Mona, which was a surprising thing, because in general Pierce liked innocent, cheerful people like his cousin and fiancée, Clancy Mayfair.

Mona wasn’t innocent, except in the most serious sense of the word. That is, she didn’t think she was bad, and she didn’t mean to do bad. She was just sort of a…pagan.

And freedom she had all right, for her pagan ways, and the confession of accelerated sexual activity had also been calculated. Within weeks of Mona’s decision to go active, the phone had been ringing off the hook with stories of Mona’s various liaisons. “Do you know that child likes to do it in the cemetery!” Cecilia had cried.

But what could Gifford do? Alicia loathed the very sight of Gifford now. She would not let Gifford in the house, though Gifford went there all the time of course. Ancient Evelyn told no one what she saw or didn’t see.

“I told you all about my boyfriends,” Mona had said. “Don’t choose to worry about this!”

At least Ancient Evelyn did not tell those tales night and day, of how she and Julien had danced together to the music of the Victrola. And it may not have ever reached Mona’s tender ears that her great-grandmother had had an affair with Cousin Stella. After all, not even clever Mr. Lightner had known about that! Not a word in his history about Stella’s ladies!

“That was my grand time,” Ancient Evelyn had told Gifford and Alicia with relish. “We were in Europe, and Stella and I were together in Rome when it happened. I don’t know where Lionel was, and that horrid nurse, she was out with baby Antha. I never experienced such love as with Stella. Stella had been with many women, she told me that night. She couldn’t even count them. She said the love of women was like the crème de la crème. I think it is. I would have done it again, if ever there had been anyone who stole my heart as Stella stole it. I remember when we came back from Europe, we went to the French Quarter together. Stella kept this little place, and we slept in the big bed and then ate oysters and shrimps and drank wine together. Oh, those weeks in Rome had been too brief. Oh…” And on and on it had gone, until they were back to the Victrola again; Julien had given it to her. Stella understood. Stella never asked for it back. It was Mary Beth who had come up to Amelia Street and said, “Give me Julien’s Victrola.” He had been dead six months, and she’d been tearing through his rooms.

“Of course I didn’t give it to her.” Then Ancient Evelyn would take Gifford and Alicia into her room, and crank up the little Victrola. She would play so many old music-hall songs, and then the arias from La Traviata. “I saw that opera with Stella in New York. How I loved Stella.”

“My dear,” she had once said to all of them-Alicia, Gifford and little Mona, who might have been too young then to understand-“sometime or other you must know the soft yielding and precious love of another woman. Don’t be a fool. It’s nothing abnormal. It’s sugar with your coffee. It’s strawberry ice cream. It’s chocolate.”

No wonder Alicia had become what everyone called a perfect slut. She had never known what she was doing. She’d slept with the sailors off the ships, with the army men, with anyone and everyone, until Patrick had swept her off her feet. “Alicia, I’m going to save you.”

Their first night had been one long drunk, until dawn, and then Patrick had announced he was taking Alicia in hand. She was a lost soul, little thing, he would care for her. He got her pregnant with Mona. But those had been the years of champagne and laughter. Now they were just plain drunks; there was nothing left of romance. Except Mona.

Gifford checked her watch-the tiny gold wristwatch that Ancient Evelyn had given her. Yes, less than one hour more of Mardi Gras, and then at the witching hour it would be Ash Wednesday, and she could go home-back to New Orleans.

She’d wait until morning, probably, maybe even noon. Then she’d drive into the city, cheerfully oblivious to the hideous stream of traffic exiting New Orleans in the other direction, and be home by four o’clock. She’d stop in Mobile at St. Cecilia’s to get the ashes on her forehead. Merely thinking of the little church, of her saints, and her angels, comforted her, and allowed her to close her eyes. Ashes to ashes. One hour more of Mardi Gras, and then I can go home.

What had been so scary about Mardi Gras, Ryan had wanted to know.

“That you would all gather there at First Street, just as if Rowan were opening the front door! That’s what was so scary.”

She thought again of that medal. Must go make certain it was in her purse. Later.

“You have to realize what this house means to this family,” Ryan had said to her. Ryan! As if she had no idea growing up as she had only ten blocks away, with Ancient Evelyn reciting history to her daily. “I’m not speaking of this Mayfair Witches tale now. I’m speaking of us, this family!”

She turned her head in against the back of the couch. Oh, if she could only stay in Destin forever. But that wasn’t possible and never would be. Destin was for hiding out, not really living. Destin was just a beach and a house with a fireplace.

The small white phone nestled into the pillows beside her gave a sudden and jarring peal. For a moment she couldn’t remember where it was. The receiver fell off the hook as she grappled for it, then put it to her ear.

“This is Gifford,” she said wearily. And thank God it was Ryan who answered:

“I didn’t wake you up?”

“No,” she said with a sigh. “When do I ever sleep anymore? I’ve been waiting. Tell me everything went all right up there, tell me Michael is better, tell me no one got hurt or…”

“Gifford, for heaven’s sakes. What are you thinking when you say something like that, that a litany will change what may have already taken place? You’re flinging charms at me. What good will it do? Do you want to hear the words that are scheduled to come out of my mouth? What am I supposed to do? Break it to you gently if someone got stomped to death by a mounted policeman or crushed by the wheels of a float?”

Ah, everything was fine. Nothing was wrong at all. Gifford could have hung up then, but that wouldn’t have been very considerate of Ryan, who would now break it down for her into a series of small reports, the central theme of which was: “Everything went fine, you fool, you should have stayed in town.”

“After twenty-six years, you don’t know what I’m thinking,” she said halfheartedly, not really wanting to argue, or even to talk anymore. Her exhaustion was hitting her now, now that Mardi Gras was truly almost over.

“No, I sure as hell don’t know what you’re thinking,” he said evenly. “I don’t know why you’re in Florida, instead of here with us.”

“Skip to the next subject,” said Gifford blandly.

“Michael is fine, just fine. Everybody is fine. Jean caught more beads than anybody else in the family; Little CeeCee won the costume award, and Pierce definitely wants to marry Clancy any minute! If you want your son to do things right and proper, you’d better get back here and start talking about the wedding to Clancy’s mother. She’s certainly not listening to me.”

“Did you tell her we’d pay for the wedding?”

“No, I didn’t get to that.”

“Get to it. That’s all she wants to hear. Talk about Michael again. What did you all tell him about Rowan?”

“As little as we could.”

“Thank God for that.”

“He’s just not strong enough to hear the whole story.”

“Who knows the whole story?” asked Gifford, bitterly.

“But we are going to have to tell him, Gifford. We can’t put it off much longer. He has to know. He is on the mend, physically. Mentally, I can’t say. No one can say. He looks…so different.”

“Older, you mean,” she said dismally.

“No, just different. It isn’t just his graying hair. It’s the look in his eye, his way of behaving. He’s so gentlemanly and placid, so patient with everyone.”

“You don’t need to upset him,” said Gifford.

“Well, you leave it to me,” said Ryan, using one of his favorite phrases, which was always brought out with exquisite tenderness. “Just take care of yourself up there. Don’t go into the water alone.”

“Ryan, the water’s freezing. I’ve had a fire going all day. It was clear, though, clear and blue and quiet. Sometimes I think I could stay here forever. Ryan, I’m sorry. I just couldn’t go up to First Street, I just couldn’t be in that house.”

“I know, Gifford, I know. But be assured, the kids thought it was the best Mardi Gras ever. Everybody loves being back at First Street. Just about everybody was there, too, at some time or other during the day. I mean at least six or seven hundred of the family trooped in and out. I frankly lost count. Remember the Mayfairs from Denton, Texas? Even they came. And the Gradys from New York. It was wonderful of Michael to let it all go on as usual. Gifford, I don’t mean this reproachfully, but if you’d seen how well it went, you’d understand.”

“What about Alicia?” Gifford asked, meaning, Did Alicia make it through sober? “Were she and Patrick all right?”

“Alicia never made it up to the house. She was completely drunk by three p.m. Patrick shouldn’t have come. Patrick’s sick. We have to get him some medical attention.”

Gifford sighed. She hoped that Patrick would die. She knew she did. Why kid herself? She had never liked or loved Patrick, and now he was the worst sort of burden to all those around him-a vicious drunk, who took special pleasure in being mean to his wife, and his daughter. Mona didn’t give a damn. “I have no respect for Dad,” she said coldly. But Alicia was forever at Patrick’s mercy. “Why are you looking at me like that? What have I done now? Did you drink the last beer? You knew it was the last beer and you deliberately drank it!”

“Well, how did Patrick do?” Gifford asked, hoping against hope that he’d fallen and broken his neck, and that Ryan just hadn’t wanted to tell her.

“Had a fight with Beatrice. Something about Mona. I doubt he’ll remember a thing. He stormed off home after the parade. You know Bea on the subject of Mona. She still wants to send Mona away to school. And do you realize what’s happening between Aaron and Bea? Michael’s Aunt Vivian said…”

“I know,” sighed Gifford. “You’d think he would have learned something from his own research into our family.”

Ryan gave a polite laugh. “Oh, forget about that nonsense. If you’d forget that foolishness, you’d stay here and be with us, and enjoy this time. God knows, things can only get worse when we do find Rowan.”

“Why do you say that?”

“We’ll have problems to deal with then, real problems. Look, I’m too tired now to take that on. Rowan’s been missing sixty-seven days exactly. I’m worn out from talking to detectives in Zurich and Scotland and in France. Mardi Gras was fun. We all had fun. We were together. But Bea’s right, you know, Mona should go away to school, don’t you think? After all, she is some sort of bona fide genius.”

Gifford wanted to answer. She wanted to say again that Mona wouldn’t go away to school, and that if they tried to force her, Mona would simply get right back on the plane, or the train, or the bus, and come directly home. You couldn’t make Mona go away to school! If you sent Mona to Switzerland, she’d be home in forty-eight hours. If you sent her to China, she’d be back, perhaps in less time than that. Gifford said nothing now. She only felt the usual comfortable aching love for Mona, and the desperate faith that Mona somehow would be all right.

One time Gifford had asked Mona: “What’s the difference between men and women?”

Mona had said: “Men don’t know what can happen. They’re happy. But women know everything that can happen. They worry all the time.”

Gifford had laughed at that. Her other precious memory was of six-year-old Mona on the day that Alicia had passed out on the porch of the Amelia Street house, right on top of her pocketbook, and Mona, unable to get the key out of it, had climbed up the trellis to the high second-story window, and carefully broken out only a small jagged hole in the glass with the heel of her Mary Jane so that she could reach the lock. Of course the entire glass had to be replaced, but Mona had been so neat about it, so sure of herself. Just little splinters of glass scattered in the garden and on the rug upstairs. “Why don’t you just tape wax paper to it?” she’d asked later, when Gifford called the man to fix the window. “That’s the way all the other holes in this place are fixed.”

Why had Gifford let that child go through these things? And Mona was still going through them. There was another carousel of grief and guilt that she could ride for hours and hours. Like the Michael and Rowan carousel. Why not? Did a month ever pass that Gifford didn’t remember that incident, the image of six-year-old Mona dragging the unconscious Alicia through the front door. And Dr. Blades calling from the clinic across the street:

“Gifford, your sister is really sick over there, you know, and that child and Ancient Evelyn really have their hands full!”

“Don’t worry about Mona,” said Ryan now, as if he were reading her thoughts in this uneasy weary silence. “Mona is the least of our worries. We have a conference scheduled for Tuesday regarding Rowan’s disappearance. We will all sit down and decide what to do.”

“How can you decide what to do!” Gifford asked. “You have no evidence that Rowan is being forced to stay away from Michael. You…”

“Well, honey, we do have evidence, rather strong evidence. That’s the thing. We have to realize it. We are certain now that the last two checks cashed on Rowan’s personal account were not signed by her. That is what we have to tell Michael.”

Silence. That was the first definitive thing that had happened. And it struck Gifford as hard as if someone had socked her in the chest. She caught her breath.

“We know for sure they were forgeries,” said Ryan. “And honey, those are the last checks. Nothing, I mean nothing, has come into the bank since those were cashed in New York two weeks ago.”

“New York.”

“Yes. That’s where the trail runs out, Gifford. We’re not even sure that Rowan herself was ever in New York. Look, I’ve been on the phone three times today about all this. There is no Mardi Gras Day in the rest of the country. I came home to a machine full of messages. The doctor who spoke to Rowan by phone is on his way here from San Francisco. He has important things to say. But he doesn’t know where Rowan is. Those checks are our last bit of-”

“I follow you,” said Gifford weakly.

“Look, Pierce is picking up the doctor tomorrow morning. I’m coming up to get you. I made up my mind earlier.”

“That’s absurd. I have my car. We won’t be able to drive back together. Ryan, go to bed and sleep. I’ll be home tomorrow in time to see this doctor from San Francisco.”

“I want to come get you, Gif. I’ll hire a car, and I’ll drive your car home.”

“That’s stupid, Ryan. I’ll leave at noon. I’ve already planned it. Go meet the doctor. Go to the office. Do whatever you have to do. The point is, the family gathered and it was splendid, just the way it was supposed to be, Rowan or no Rowan. Michael was apparently a trouper. And two forged checks, well, what does that mean?”

Silence. Of course they both knew what it could mean.

“Did Mona shock anybody tonight?”

“Only her cousin David. I’d say she had a good day. Pierce is fine. He’s gone out for a dip with Clancy. The pool is steaming. Barbara’s asleep. Shelby called; sorry she didn’t come home. Lilia called too. Mandrake called. Jenn’s snuggled up with Elizabeth in the den. I’m about to collapse where I stand.”

Gifford gave a long sigh. “Mona went home to that house with those two? All alone on Mardi Gras?”

“Mona is all right, you know she is. Ancient Evelyn would call me here if anything was wrong. She was sitting beside Alicia’s bed this afternoon when I left them.”

“And so we lie to ourselves about that, as always, along with everything else.”

“Gifford.”

“Yes, Ryan?”

“I want to ask you a question. I’ve never asked you anything like this before, and I don’t think I could ask you now, if we weren’t…”

“Talking on the phone.”

“Yes. Talking on the phone.”

They had many times discussed this strange aspect of their long marriage, that their best conversations were on the phone, that somehow or other, they were patient with each other on the phone, and could avoid the battles they fought when together.

“This is the question,” said Ryan in his customary direct way. “What do you think happened on Christmas Day at that house? What happened to Rowan? Do you have any suspicion, any inkling, any vibe of any kind?”

Gifford was speechless. It was more than true that Ryan had never asked her a question like this in all their lives. Most of Ryan’s energy went to preventing Gifford from seeking answers to difficult questions. This was not only unprecedented, it was alarming. Because Gifford realized that she could not rise to the occasion. She didn’t have a witch’s answer to this question. She thought for a long moment, listening to the fire burn, and to the soft sigh of the water outside, so soft it might have been her own breath.

A number of thoughts passed vagrantly through her mind. She even almost said, “Ask Mona.” But then she caught herself, protective and full of shame that she would encourage her niece in that sort of thing. And without preamble, or any sort of forethought, Gifford said:

“The man came through on Christmas Day. That thing, that spirit-I’m not going to say its name, you know its name-it got into the world and it did something to Rowan. That’s what happened. The man’s no longer at First Street. All of us know it. All of us who ever saw him know he’s not there. The house is empty. The thing got into the world. It-” Her speech, rapid, high-pitched, faintly hysterical, broke off as abruptly as it had begun. She thought: Lasher. But she could not say it. Years and years ago Aunt Carlotta had shaken her and said, “Never, never, never say that name, do you hear me?”

And even now, in this quiet safe place, she could not speak the name. Something stopped her, rather like a hand on her throat. Maybe it had to do with the peculiar blend of cruelty and protectiveness which Carlotta had always shown for her. The Talamasca history had said that Antha was pushed through the attic window, that the eye was torn from her head. Dear God! Carlotta couldn’t have done such a thing.

She wasn’t surprised that her husband hesitated before responding to her. In the silence she was full of surprise herself. It all loomed before her, and she also knew in these moments the terrible loneliness of her marriage.

“You really believe that, Gifford. In your heart of hearts, you, my beloved Gifford, believe that.”

She didn’t answer. Couldn’t. She felt too defeated. They had been arguing all of their lives, it seemed. Would it storm, would it shine? Would a stranger rape Mona on St. Charles Avenue as she walked alone at night? Would income taxes go up again? Would Castro be overthrown? Were there ghosts? Were the Mayfairs witches? Could anyone really speak with the dead? Why did the dead behave so strangely? What the hell did the dead want? Butter is not unhealthy, and neither is red meat. Drink your milk. One cannot metabolize milk as an adult, and so forth and so on, forever.

“Yes, Ryan,” she said sadly and almost offhandedly. “I believe it. But you see, Ryan, seeing is believing. And I always saw him. You never could.”

She had used the wrong word. Could. Real mistake, that. She could hear the little soft sighs with which he drew away from her, away from the possibility of belief or trust, into his well-constructed universe where ghosts did not exist, and Mayfair witchcraft was a family joke, as much fun as all the old houses, and quaint trust funds, and jewelry and gold coins in the vaults. As much fun as Clancy Mayfair marrying Pierce Mayfair, which really, really, really shouldn’t happen, since both were-like Alicia and Patrick-descended from Julien, but what was the use of telling him? What was the use? There was no reason, there was no exchange of ideas, there was no genuine trust.

But there’s love, she thought. There is love and there is a form of respect. She didn’t depend on anyone in the world the way she did on Ryan. So she said what she always said at such times:

“I love you, my darling,” and it was wonderful to say an Ingrid Bergman line like that with so much heart and mean it so completely. “I really do.” Lucky Gifford.

“Gifford…” Silence on the other end of the line. A lawyer thinking quietly, the man with the silver-white hair and blue eyes, who did the practical worrying with her for the whole family. Why should he believe in ghosts? Ghosts don’t try to break wills, they don’t sue you, they don’t threaten you with Internal Revenue investigations, they don’t bill you for the two-martini lunch.

“What is it, darling?” she asked softly.

“If you believe that,” he said. “If you really believe what you just said to me…if this ghost got through…and the house is empty…then why wouldn’t you go there, Gifford? Why wouldn’t you come today?”

“The thing took Rowan away,” she said angrily. “This isn’t finished, Ryan!” Suddenly she was sitting up. Every bit of goodwill she felt for her husband had done its usual evaporation act. He was the same tiresome and impossible man who had wrecked her life. That was true. It was true that she loved him. It was true that the ghost had come through. “Ryan, don’t you feel things in that house? Don’t you sense things? It isn’t over, it’s just begun! We have to find Rowan!”

“I’m going to come get you in the morning,” he said. He was furious. Her anger had drawn out his anger. But he was struggling. “I want to come up there and drive you back home.”

“OK, Ryan,” she said. “I wish you would.” She heard the plea in her own voice, the plea that meant surrender.

She was only glad that she’d had the courage to say the little bit she had about “the man,” that for the record, she had spoken her piece, and he could argue with her, and beat her down, and criticize her to death later on, perhaps, Tomorrow.

“Gifford, Gifford, Gifford…” he sang softly. “I’m going to drive up. I’ll be there before you wake up.”

And she felt so weak suddenly, so irrationally incapable of moving until he came there, until she saw him come through the door.

“Now, lock up the house tight, please,” he said, “and go to sleep. I’ll bet you’re sacked out on the couch and everything’s open…”

“This is Destin, Ryan.”

“Lock up, make sure the gun is in the chest by the bed, and please, please, please set the alarm.”

The gun, good Lord! “As if I’d use it with you not here.”

“That’s when you need it, darling, when I’m not there.” She smiled again, remembering Mona. Bang, bang, bang. Kisses.

They still blew kisses to each other before they rang off.

The first time she had kissed him, she was fifteen, and they were “in love,” and later Alicia said, when Mona was born: “You’re lucky. You love your Mayfair. I married mine ’cause of this!”

Gifford wished she had taken Mona, then and there. Probably Alicia would have let her do it. Alicia was already a full-time drunk. It’s a wonder Mona had been born at all, let alone robust and healthy. But Gifford hadn’t really thought of taking Alicia’s baby from her; she could still remember when Ellie Mayfair, whom Gifford never knew, had taken Deirdre’s baby, Rowan, all the way to California, to save her from the family curse, and everyone had hated her for it. That had been the same terrible year that Oncle Cortland had died, after falling down the steps at First Street. So terrible for Ryan.

Gifford had been fifteen and already they were very much in love. No, you simply did not take a baby away from a mother, no matter what you thought. They’d driven Deirdre mad, and Oncle Cortland had tried to stop it.

Of course Gifford could have taken better care of Mona. Hell, anybody could have taken better care of Mona than Alicia and Patrick. And in her own way, Gifford always had taken care of Mona, as surely as she took care of her own children.

The fire had died away. She was getting just a little uncomfortably cold. Best to build it up again. She didn’t need much sleep anymore. If she dozed off sometime around two, she’d be fine when Ryan got here. That was one thing about being forty-six. She didn’t need sleep anymore.

She went down on her knees in front of the broad stone hearth and, lifting another small oak log from the neat stack beside the fireplace, threw it into the weak little fire. A bunch of newspaper, crumpled, with kindling, and off it went, curling and flaring against the soot-blackened bricks. The bright warmth came out all over her hands and her face, until she was driven back by it, and there was a sudden moment of remembering something unpleasant, something to do with fire and the family history, but then she deliberately and carefully forgot.

She stood in the living room looking out over the white beach. Now she could not hear the waves at all. The breeze covered everything in a heavy drape of silence. The stars shone as brightly as if they were tumbling on the Final Day. And the sheer cleanness of the breeze delighted her and made her want to cry.

She wished she could stay until all this seemed too much. Until she longed for the oaks of home again. But that had never happened. She’d always left before she truly wanted to. Duty, family, something-always compelled her home from Destin before she was ready.

That was not to say that she didn’t love the cobwebs and old oaks, that she didn’t love the crumbling walls, and listing town houses, and broken pavements; and the lovely endless embrace of her good cousins and cousins and cousins. Yes, she loved it, but sometimes she only wanted to be away.

This was away.

She shuddered. “I wish I could die,” she whispered, her voice trembling and fading away on the breeze. She went into the open kitchen-no more than a section of the giant main room-and filled a glass with water, and drank the water down. Then she went out through the open glass doors, through the yard, and up the steps and out the boardwalk over the little dune and down on the clean-swept sand.

Now you could hear the Gulf. The sound filled you. There was nothing else in the world. The breeze broke you loose from everything, and all sensation. When she glanced back, the house looked deceptively small and insignificant, more of a bunker than the handsome little cottage it was, behind its levee of sand.

The law couldn’t make you change something which had been built in 1955. And that is when Great-grandmother Dorothy had built it for her children and her grandchildren, and Destin was no more than a sleepy little fishing village, or so everyone said. No condominium towers in those days. No Goofy Golf. Just this.

And the Mayfairs still had their bits and pieces of it, tucked away every few miles from Pensacola all the way down to Seaside-old bungalows of various size and age built before the thundering hordes-and the building codes-had come.

Gifford felt chilled, pummeled by the breeze suddenly, as if it had doubled its fist and tried to push her rudely to one side. She walked against it, down to the water, eyes fixed on the soft waves that barely lapped on the glittering beach. She wanted to lie down here and sleep. She had done that when she was a girl. What safer beach was there than this unknown sweep of Destin, where no dune buggies or vehicles of any kind could ever come to hurt you with their wheels or their hideousness, or their noise.

Who was that poet who had been killed long ago on the beach at Fire Island? Run over in his sleep, they thought, though no one ever knew? Horrible thing, horrible. She couldn’t remember his name. Only his poems. College days; beer; Ryan kissing her on the deck of the dancing boat, and promising her he would take her away from New Orleans. What lies! They were going to live in China! Or was it Brazil? Ryan had gone right into Mayfair and Mayfair. It had swallowed him whole before his twenty-first birthday. She wondered if he could remember now their favorite poets-how they loved D. H. Lawrence’s poem about blue gentians, or Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning.”

But she couldn’t blame him for what had happened. She had been unable to say no to Ancient Evelyn, and Granddaddy Fielding and all the old ones who cared so much, even though her own father and mother were dead; it was as if Gifford and Alicia both had always belonged to the older ones. Ryan’s mother never would have forgiven them had they not gone through with the white-dress wedding. And Gifford could not have left Alicia then, who was still so young and already mad and getting into constant trouble. Gifford hadn’t even gone away to school; when she’d asked to go, Ancient Evelyn had said:

“And what is wrong with Tulane? You can ride the streetcar.” And Gifford had. To Sophie Newcomb College. That they’d let her go to the Sorbonne in her sophomore year had been a minor miracle.

“And you a tenfold Mayfair,” Ancient Evelyn had declared when the wedding was being discussed. “Even your mother would be shocked, God rest her soul, and to think how she suffered.”

No, there had been no real question of Gifford getting away, of a life up north or in Europe or anywhere else on the planet. The biggest fight had been over the church. Would Gifford and Ryan marry at Holy Name or go back in the Irish Channel to St. Alphonsus?

Gifford and Alicia had gone to Holy Name School; on Sundays they went to Mass at Holy Name, uptown across from Audubon Park, a world away from old St. Alphonsus. The church had been white still in those days, before they painted the nave, and the statues were exquisitely made of pure marble.

In that church on the Avenue, Gifford had made her Communion and her Confirmation, and walked in procession her senior year, with bouquet in hand, in white ankle-length dress and high heels, a ritual worthy of a debutante.

Marry at Holy Name. It seemed so natural. What was St. Alphonsus to her, the old Mayfair church? And Deirdre Mayfair would never know. She was by that time, already, hopelessly crazy. It was Granddaddy Fielding who made the fuss. “St. Alphonsus is our church and you a tenfold Mayfair!”

Tenfold Mayfair. “I hate that expression. It doesn’t mean anything,” Gifford had said often enough. “It makes me think of folded napkins.”

“Nonsense,” Ancient Evelyn had said. “It means you are ten times from within the fold. Ten different lines of descent. That’s what it means. You ought to be proud of it.”

Evenings, Ancient Evelyn sat on the porch of Amelia Street, knitting until it got too dark for her to see. Enjoying as she always had the drowsy twilight on St. Charles Avenue with so many people out strolling, and the streetcars with their yellow lights on inside, crashing along the curving track. Dust, those were the days of noise and dust-before air-conditioning and wall-to-wall carpets, the days of helping take laundry stiff as paper off the back line. You could make people out of the little old clothespins-little wooden men wearing tiny hats.

Yes, we had belonged to the old ones, Gifford thought. All Gifford’s life, her mother had been ill, a recluse, suffering, and pacing the floor behind closed doors, and then dying when Gifford and Alicia were so young.

But Gifford had a lingering fondness for that old way of life, or walking on the Avenue with Ancient Evelyn, who always had her Irish cane. Or reading to Granddaddy Fielding.

No, I never really wanted to leave, she thought. She had never stayed long in any modern American city. Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles, they weren’t to her taste, even though their initial cleanliness and efficiency might prove very attractive. She remembered the first time she’d seen Los Angeles as a child. What a city of wonders! But she tired of those other places quickly. And maybe the charm of Destin was that it was so very close to home. You gave up nothing to come here. She could push the pedal to the floor and see those oaks by sunset. New Orleans, city of roaches, city of decay, city of our family, and of happy, happy people.

She remembered that quote from Hilaire Belloc that she’d found in her father’s papers, after his death:

Where e’er the Catholic sun does shine

There’s music, laughter, and good red wine

At least I’ve always found it so.

Benedicamus Domino!

“Let me tell you a little secret,” her mother, Laura Lee, had said to her once. “If you’re a tenfold Mayfair, which you are, you’ll never be happy outside New Orleans. Don’t bother.” Well, she’d probably been right. Tenfold, fifteenfold. But had Laura Lee been happy? Gifford could still remember her laugh, the crack in her deep voice. “I’m too sick to think about happiness, daughter dear. Bring me the Times-Picayune and a cup of hot tea.”

And to think Mona had more Mayfair blood than anyone in the clan. What was she? Twentyfold? Now, Gifford had to see this computerized family exploration for herself, this endless chart that traced all those many lines, of double cousins and triple cousins marrying one another. What she had wanted to know was this: was there any fresh blood at all during the last four or five generations?

It was becoming ridiculous now, Mayfair marrying Mayfair. They didn’t bother to try to explain it to others. And now Michael Curry, all alone in that house, and Rowan gone, heaven only knew where, the child once stolen away for her own good, come right back home to be cursed somehow…

Ryan had said once, in a very reckless moment, “You know, Gifford, there are only two things in life that matter-family and money, that’s really it. Being very very rich, like we are, and having your family around you.”

How she had laughed. It must have been April 15th, and he had only just filed his income tax. But she’d known what he meant. She was no painter, no singer, no dancer, no musician. Neither was Ryan. And family and money were their entire world. Same with all the Mayfairs she knew. The family was not just the family to them; it was the clan; the nation; the religion; the obsession.

I could never have lived a life without them, she thought, mouthing the words as she liked to do out here, where the wind off the water devoured everything, where the featureless roar of the waves made her feel lightheaded and as if she could in fact sing. Ought to sing.

And Mona will have a good life! Mona will go to whatever college she wants! Mona can stay or go. She will have choices. There wasn’t a fit cousin for Mona to marry, now, was there? Of course there was. She could think of twenty if she tried, but she didn’t. The point was Mona would have a freedom that Gifford never had. Mona was strong. Gifford had dreams in which Mona was always very strong, and doing things that nobody else could do, like walking on top of a high wall, and saying, “Hurry up, Aunt Gifford.” Once in a dream, Mona had been sitting on the wing of a plane, smoking a cigarette as they flew through the clouds, and Gifford, terrified, had been clinging to a rope ladder.

She stopped very still on the beach and tipped her head to the side, letting the wind bring her hair tight around her face, covering her eyes. She floated, the wind holding her steady. Ah, the loveliness of it all, she thought, the sheer loveliness. And Ryan coming to take her home. Ryan would be here. Maybe by some miracle Rowan was alive! Rowan would come home! All would be explained and the great shining miracle of Rowan’s first return would begin to give forth its light again.

Yes, sink down and sleep in the sand. Dream of it. Think about Clancy’s dress. You have to help her with her dress. Her mother doesn’t know a thing about clothes.

Was it now Ash Wednesday?

She couldn’t see her watch by the light of the clear heavens. Even the moon did not help, shining so brightly down upon the water. But she felt in her bones that it was the beginning of Lent. That far away in New Orleans, Rex and Comus had opened their ballrooms to one another, and the courts had taken their final Mardi Gras bows. Shrove Tuesday was over.

But she had to go in. Ryan had said to go in, to lock everything up, to turn on the alarm. She knew she would do it because he had said so. Some night when she was really angry with him, she’d sleep in the sand, safe, and free, beneath the stars, like a wanderer. On this beach, you were all alone with the oldest part of the known world-the sand, the sea. You could have been in any time. You could have been in any book, in biblical lands, in Atlantis of legend. But for now, do what Ryan says. Don’t for the love of God be asleep out here when he comes! He’ll be so furious!

Ah, she wished he was here now.

The night last year that Deirdre Mayfair had died, Gifford had wakened with a scream, and Ryan had taken hold of her. “Somebody’s dead,” she’d cried, and he’d held her. Only the phone ringing had taken him away. “Deirdre. It’s Deirdre.”

Would she have such a feeling when something finally happened to Rowan? Or was Rowan too far away from the fold? Had she died already in some horrid and shabby way, perhaps only hours after her departure? No, there had been letters and messages from her in the beginning. All the codes are correct, Ryan had said. And then Rowan had actually called that doctor in California long distance on the phone.

Ah, tomorrow we’ll know something from this doctor, and round her thoughts came again to the same place, and she turned her back on the sea, and walked towards the dark dune and the soft seam of light above it.

Low houses to one side and the other, seemingly forever, and then the great threatening mass of a high-rise, studded with tiny lights to warn the low-flying planes, and far far away, in the curve of the land, the lights of the town, and out to sea the clouds curling in the moonlight.

Time to lock up and sleep, yes. But by the fire. Time to sleep that thin vigilant sleep she always enjoyed when she was alone and the fire was still burning. She’d hear the coffeepot click on at five-thirty; she’d hear the first boat that came near the shore.

Ash Wednesday. A lovely consolation came over her; something like piety and faith combined. Ashes to ashes. Stop for the ashes. And when the time comes cut the blessed palm for Palm Sunday. And take Mona with you and Pierce and Clancy and Jenn to church on Good Friday, “to kiss the cross” like in the old days. Maybe make the nine churches like they used to do. She and Ancient Evelyn and Alicia walking to nine churches, all of them uptown in those days, when the city was dense with Catholics, true believing Catholics-Holy Name, Holy Ghost, St. Stephen’s, St. Henry’s, Our Lady of Good Counsel, Mother of Perpetual Help Chapel, St. Mary’s, St. Alphonsus, St. Teresa’s. Wasn’t that nine?

They hadn’t always bothered to go as far as St. Patrick’s or stop into the church of the colored on Louisiana Avenue, though they certainly would have, segregation not existing really in Catholic churches, and Holy Ghost being a fine church. The saddest part was Ancient Evelyn always remembering St. Michael’s and how they had torn it down. Cousin Marianne had been a Sister of Mercy at St. Michael’s, and it was sad when a church was torn down, and a convent, sad when all those memories were sold to the salvage company. And to think Marianne too had been Julien’s spawn, or so it had been said.

How many of those churches were left? thought Gifford. Well, this year on Good Friday, she’d drive up to Amelia and St. Charles and challenge Mona to find them with her. Mona loved walking in dangerous neighborhoods. That’s how Gifford would lure her out. “Come on, I want to find Grandmother’s nine churches. I think they’re all still there!” What if they could get Ancient Evelyn herself to come? Hercules could drive her along as they walked. She certainly couldn’t walk now, she was far too old. That would have been foolish.

Mona would go for it, only Mona would start asking about that Victrola again. She had it in her head that now that First Street was refurbished, somebody would find that Victrola in the attic and give it to her. She didn’t know that the Victrola really wasn’t in the attic at all, but once again hidden with the pearls where no one-

The thought left Gifford. It went right out of her mind. She had just reached the top of the boardwalk and was looking down into her own house, into the warm rectangle of the living room, with its steady flickering fire, and the sprawling cream-colored leather couches on the caramel-colored tile floor.

There was someone in Gifford’s house. There was someone standing right by the couch where Gifford had napped all evening, standing right by the fire. Indeed, the man had his foot on the hearth, just the way Gifford liked to put hers, especially when her feet were bare, to feel the inevitable cold that lingered in the stone.

This man was not barefoot or in any form of casual attire. This man looked dapper to her in the firelight, very tall, and “imperially thin” like Richard Cory in the old Edwin Arlington Robinson poem.

She moved a little slowly along the boardwalk, and then stepped down out of the wind into the relative quiet and warmth of the rear yard. Through the glass doors, her house looked like a picture. Only this man was wrong. And the truly wrong part of him was not his dark tweed jacket, or wool sweater; it was his hair; his long, shining black hair.

It hung over his shoulders, rather Christlike she thought. Indeed as he turned and looked at her, it was a dime-store Christ that came to mind-one of those blinding color pictures of Jesus with eyes that open and close when you tilt it, full of lurid color and immediately accessible prettiness-Jesus of soft curls and soft garments, and a tender smile with no mystery and no pain. The man even had the mustache and neatly groomed beard of the familiar Christ. They made his face seem grand and saintly.

Yes, he looked like that, sort of-this man. Who the hell was this man? Some neighbor who had wandered in the front door to beg a twenty-five-amp fuse or a flashlight? Dressed in Harris tweed?

He stood in her living room, looking down at the fire, with the long flowing profile of Jesus, and gradually he turned and looked at her, as if he had heard her all along, moving through the windy dark, and knew that she had come into earshot and stood now silently questioning him with her hand on the steel frame of the door.

Full face. It was suddenly a bright redeeming beauty that impressed her; something that bore the weight of the extravagant hair and the precious clothes; and another element struck her, other than the seductiveness of his face. It was a fragrance, almost a perfume.

It wasn’t sweet, however, this perfume. It wasn’t flowers, and it wasn’t candy and it wasn’t spice. No. But it was so inviting. It made her want to take a deep breath. And she’d caught this scent somewhere else, only recently. Yes, known this same strange craving before. But could not now remember it. In fact, hadn’t she remarked on it then, the strange scent…Something to do with the medal of St. Michael. Ah, the medal. Make sure the medal is in your purse. But she was thinking foolishly. There was a strange person here!

She knew she ought to be wary of him. She ought to find out who he was and what he wanted immediately, perhaps before she stepped inside. But every time in her life that something like this had frightened her, she had always come through it, half embarrassed to have made such a fuss. Nothing really bad had ever happened directly to Gifford.

Probably was a neighbor, or someone whose car had stalled. Someone who saw the light of her fire, or even the sparks flying from the chimney along this lonely stretch of sleeping beach.

It didn’t greatly concern her, not half as much as it intrigued her, that this strange being should be standing there watching her in her own house, by her own fire. There was no menace in this man’s face or manner; indeed, he seemed to be experiencing the very same curiosity and warmth of interest towards her.

He watched her come into the room. She started to close the glass door behind her, but then thought better of it.

“Yes? What can I do for you?” she asked. Once again the Gulf had fallen back into a whisper near silence. Her back was to the edge of the world, and the edge of the world was quiet.

The fragrance was suddenly overpowering. It seemed to fill the entire room. It mingled with the burning oak logs in the fireplace, and the charred smell of the bricks, and with the cold fresh air.

“Come to me, Gifford,” he answered with a smooth astonishing simplicity. “Come into my arms.”

“I didn’t quite hear you,” she answered, the forced and uneasy smile flashing before she could stop it, the words falling from her lips as she drew closer and felt the heat of the fire. The fragrance was so delicious, made her want to do nothing suddenly but breathe. “Who are you?” She tried to make it sound polite. Casual. Normal. “Do we know each other, you and I?”

“Yes, Gifford. You know me. You know who I am,” he said. His voice was lyrical as if he were reciting something that rhymed, but it didn’t rhyme. He seemed to cherish the simple syllables he spoke. “You saw me when you were a little girl,” he said, making the last word very beautiful. “I know you did. I can’t really remember the moment now. You can remember for both of us. Gifford, think back, think back to the dusty porch, the overgrown garden.” He looked sad, thoughtful.

“I don’t know you,” she said, but her voice had no conviction.

He came closer to her. The bones of his face were gracefully sculptured but the skin, how fine and flawless was the skin. He was better than the dime-store Christ, certainly. Oh, more truly like the famous self-portrait of Dürer. “Salvator Mundi,” she whispered. Wasn’t that the painting’s name?

“I’ve lost those recent centuries,” he said, “if ever I possessed them, struggling as I did then to see the simplest of solid things. But I claim older truths and memories now, before the time of my Mayfair beauties and their fragile nurture. And must rely as men do upon my chronicles-those words I wrote in haste, as the veil thickened, as the flesh tightened, robbing me of a ghost’s perspective which might have seen me triumph all the quicker and all the easier than I shall do.

“Gifford. I myself recorded the name Gifford. Gifford Mayfair-Gifford, the granddaughter of Julien. Gifford came to First Street. Gifford is one who saw Lasher, don’t I speak the truth?”

At the sound of the name, she stiffened. And the rest of his words, going on and on like a song, were barely intelligible to her.

“Yes, I paid the price of every mewling babe, but only to recover a more precious destiny, and for you a more precious and tragic love.”

He looked Christlike as he spoke, as Dürer had in the painting, deliberately perhaps, nodding just a little for emphasis, fingers pressed together in a steeple for a fleeting moment and then released to appeal to the open air. The Christ who doesn’t know how to make change and has to ask one of the Twelve Apostles, but knows he is going to die on the cross.

Her mind was utterly blank, unable to proceed, to frame a response or a plan. Lasher. Her body told her suddenly how frightened of this strange man she was. She had lifted her own hands and was almost wringing them, a characteristic gesture with her, and she saw her own fingers like blurred wings in the corner of her vision.

In a rush of rampant pulse and heat, she could not see anything distinct about him suddenly, only the beauty itself, like a reflection marring the view through a window. Her fear surged, paralyzing her, while at the same instant forcing from her another gesture. She raised her hand to her forehead; and in a dark obliterating flash, his hand came out and locked itself around her wrist. Hot, hurtful.

Her eyes closed. She was so very frightened that she was not really there for a moment. She was not really alive. She was disconnected and out of time and out of any place; then the fear subsided and rose again, whipping her once again into terror. She felt the tightness and the pressure of his fingers; she smelled the deep warm inviting fragrance. She said willfully, in terror and in rage:

“Let me go.”

“What did you mean to do, Gifford?” The voice was almost timid; mellow; lilting as before.

He stood now very close to her. He was nearly monstrously tall, a man of six and half feet perhaps. She couldn’t calculate; just the right side of monstrous perhaps, a being of slender parts, the bones of the forehead very prominent beneath the smooth skin.

“What did you mean to do?” he asked her. Childlike, not petulant, simply very innocent and young.

“Make the Sign of the Cross!” she said in a hoarse whisper. And she did it, convulsively, tearing loose from him, and beginning again, In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. The words were spoken inside her. Then she steadied herself, and looked him full in the face. “You’re not Lasher,” she said, the word almost dying on her lips. “You’re just a man. You’re a man standing here.”

“I am Lasher,” he said gently as if trying to protect her from the coarseness of his words. “I am Lasher and I am in the flesh, and have come again, my beautiful one, my Mayfair Witch.” Lovely enunciation, careful yet so rapid. “Flesh and blood now, yes, a man, yes, again, and needing you, my beauty, my Gifford Mayfair. Cut me and I bleed. Kiss me and you quicken my passion. Learn for yourself.”

Again there was that disconnection. The terror couldn’t become old, or tedious, or even manageable. Surely a person this frightened ought to mercifully lose consciousness, and for one second she thought indeed she might do that. But she knew that if she did, she was lost. This man was standing there before her; the aroma that flooded her was coming from him. He was only a foot or two away from her now as he looked down at her, eyes radiant and fixed and imploring, face smooth as a baby’s and lips almost rosy as a child’s lips.

He seemed unaware of his beauty, or rather not to be consciously using it to dazzle her, or distract her, to comfort or quiet her. He seemed to see not himself in her eyes, but only her. “Gifford,” he whispered. “Granddaughter of Julien.”

It was as terrible suddenly, as dismal and as endless as any fear in childhood, any moment of disconsolate gloom when she had hugged her knees and cried and cried, afraid to even open her eyes, afraid of the creaking house, afraid of the sound of her mother’s moans, afraid of darkness itself, and the endless vistas of horror that lay in it.

She forced herself to look down, to feel the moment, to feel the tile beneath her feet, and the fire’s annoying and persistent flickering, to see his hands, so very white and heavily veined like those of an elderly person, and then to look up at the smooth, serene Christlike forehead with its flowing dark hair. Sculpted ridges for his sleek black eyebrows, fine bones framing his eyes, making them all the more vivid as they peered out at her. A man’s jaw, giving force and shape to the lustrous close-cropped beard.

“I want you to leave now,” she said. It sounded so nonsensical, so helpless. She pictured the gun in the closet. She had always secretly longed for a reason to use it, she knew it now. She smelled the cordite in her memory, and the dirt of the cement-walled shooting gallery in Gretna. Heard Mona cheering her on. She could feel that big heavy thing dance upwards as she pulled the trigger. Oh, how she wanted it now.

“I want you to come back in the morning,” she said, nodding emphatically as she said it. “You must leave my house now.” She even thought of the medal. Oh, God, why hadn’t she put the medal on! She had wanted to. St. Michael the Archangel, defend us in battle.

“Go away from here.”

“I can’t do that, my precious one, my Gifford,” he said as if singing to a slow-paced melody.

“You’re saying crazy things to me. I don’t know you. I’m asking you again to leave.” But when she went to step back, she did not dare. Some bit of charm or compassion had left his face abruptly. He was staring at her warily, maybe even bitterly. This was like the face of a child, all right, mobile and seductive, and endearing in its quick and abandoned flashes of feeling. How smooth and perfect the forehead; such proportion. Had Dürer been born so perfect?

“Remember me, Gifford I wish I could remember you. I stood beneath the trees when you saw me. Surely I did. Tell me what you saw. Help me remember, Gifford. Help me weave the whole into one great picture. I’m lost in this heat, and full of ancient hates and ancient grudges! Full of ancient ignorance and pain. Surely I had wisdom when I was invisible. Surely I was nearer the angels of the air, than the devils of the earth. But, oh, the flesh is so inviting. And I will not lose again, I will not be destroyed. My flesh shall live on. You know me. Say you do.”

“I don’t know you!” she declared. She had backed away, but only a step. There was so little space between them. If she had turned to run, he could have caught her by the neck. The terror rose in her again, the absolute irrational terror that he would put his long fingers on her neck. That he could, that no one could stop him, that people did such things, that she was alone with him, all of this collided silently inside her. Yet she spoke again. “Get out of here, do you hear what I’m telling you?”

“Can’t do it, beautiful one,” he answered, one eyebrow arched slightly. “Speak to me, tell me what did you see when you came to that house so long ago?”

“Why do you want me?” She dared to take one more step, very tentative. The beach lay behind. What if she were to run, across the yard over the boardwalk? And the long beach seemed the empty deserted landscapes of horrid dreams. Had she not dreamed this very thing long ago? Never, never say that name!

“I’m clumsy now,” he said with sudden heartfelt sincerity. “I think when I was a spirit I had more grace, did I not? I came and went at the perfect moment. Now I blunder through life, as do we all. I need my Mayfairs. I need you all. Would that I were singing in some still and beautiful valley; in the glen, under the moon. And I could bring you all together, back to the circle. Oh, but we will never have such luck now, Gifford. Love me, Gifford.”

He turned away as if in pain. It wasn’t that he wanted her sympathy or expected it. He didn’t care. He was anguished and silent for a long moment, staring dully and insignificantly towards the kitchen. There was something utterly compelling in his face, his attitude. “Gifford,” he said. “Gifford, tell me, what do you see in me? Am I beautiful to you?” He turned back. “Look at me.”

He bent down to kiss her like a bird coming to the edge of a pool, that swift, with the heady beat of wings, and the inundation of that fragrance as if it were an animal smell, a warm scent like the good scent of a dog, or a bird when you take it from its cage; his lips covered hers, and his long fingers slipped up around her neck, thumbs gently touching her jaw and then her cheeks, and as she tried to flee deep into herself, alone and locked away from all pain. She felt a swift delicious sensation spread out in her loins. She wanted to say, This will not happen, but she was caught so off guard by it that she realized he was holding her upright; he was cradling her in his fingers, by her neck, tenderly, and perhaps his thumbs were pressed right against her throat. The chills ran over her, up her back, down the backs of her arms. Lord, she was swooning. Swooning.

“No, no, darling, I wouldn’t hurt you. Gifford, what is my victory without this?”

Just like a song. She could almost hear a beat to it and a melody, the way the words flowed out of him in the darkness. He kissed her again, and again, and his thumbs did not crush her throat. Her arms were tingling. She did not know where her own hands were. Then she realized she had placed them against his chest. Of course she could not move him. He was a man all right, stronger than she without question, and it was vain to try to move. Then the deep thrilling sensation engulfed her, rather like the fragrance, and a lovely spasm passed through her, almost a consummation, except that it promised a great rolling succession of consummations to follow, and when you had that many consummations, it wasn’t a consummation. It was only a continuous surrender.

“Yes, give in to me,” he said, again with childlike simplicity. “You are for me. You must be.”

He released her, and then put his hands on her arms and lifted her tenderly off the floor. Next she knew she was lying on it, on the cold tile, and her eyes were open and she could feel and hear him ripping her wool stockings, and she wondered if the sweater wasn’t scratchy and rough. What was it like to embrace someone in a sweater that was so thick and rough? She tried to speak, but the fragrance was actually sickening her, or disorienting her, maybe that was more truly it. His hair fell down on her face with delicious silkiness.

“I won’t do this,” she said, but her voice sounded distant and without authority, or any power at all to speak to her own self. “Get away from me, Lasher, get away from me. I’m telling you. And Stella told Mother…” The thought was gone, just gone. An image flashed into her mind, an image from long ago of the teenaged Deirdre, her older cousin, high in the oak, leaning back, lids shut, hips thrust forward beneath her little flowered dress, the look of Bad Thoughts and Evil Touches, the look of ecstasy! And she, Gifford, had been standing beneath the tree, and she had seen the dim outline of the man, the flash of the man, and the man had been with Deirdre.

“Deliver us from evil,” she whispered.

In all her forty-six years, only one man had ever touched Gifford like that, or like this-only one man had ever torn off her clothing, in jest or clumsiness, ever forced his organ inside her, and kissed her throat. And this was flesh, no ghost, yes, flesh. Came through. I can’t. God help me.

“Angel of God, my guardian dear…” Her own words fell away from her. She had not consented, and then the horrible realization came to her that she had not fought. They would say she had not fought. There was only this hideous passivity, this confusion, and her trying to get a grip, and to push against his shoulder, with the palm of her hand sliding against the smooth wool of his coat, and his coming inside her violently as she herself felt the climax sweep over her, carrying her near to darkness and near to silence and near to peace.

But not quite.

“Why? Why are you doing this?” Had she spoken aloud? She was drifting and dizzy and full of sweet and powerful sensations, sensations like the scent and the powerful stride of his organ inside her, the pumping against her that felt so natural, so thorough, so good! She thought it had stopped and that she was turning over on her side, but then she realized she hadn’t moved at all. He was entering her again.

“Lovely Gifford,” he sang. “Fit to be my bride in the glen, in the circle, my bride.”

“I think, I think you’re hurting me…” she said. “Oh God! Oh Mother. Help me. God. Somebody.”

He covered her mouth again as once more the hot flood of semen came into her, spilling over and out and leaking down beneath her, and the sweet soft enchanting sensations lifted her and tossed her from one side to the other.

“Help me, somebody.”

“There isn’t anybody, darling. That’s the secret of the universe,” he said. “That is my theme, that is my cry. That is my message. And it feels so good, doesn’t it? All your life you’ve told yourself it wasn’t important…”

“Yes…”

“That there were loftier things, and now you know, you know why people risk hell for this, this flesh, this ecstasy.”

“Yes.”

“You know that whatever you have been forever or before, you are now alive, and with me, and I am inside you, and you are this body, no matter what else you are. My precious Gifford.”

“Yes.”

“Make my baby. See it, Gifford. See it. See its tiny limbs; see it swim to consciousness; see it; pick it out of the dark. Be the witch of my dreams, Gifford, be the mother of my child.”

The sun shone down on her, making her hot and uncomfortable in the heavy sweater, and the pain inside her woke her suddenly, pushing her all the way up through the mist until she squinted not into mist at all but into the glaring sky.

The pain twisted, pulsed. These were cramps, these pains. These were contractions! She willed her hand to slip down between her legs. She felt the wetness and held up her hand to see the blood. She brought it close to her face and the blood dripped down on her. She felt it. Even the glare could not stop her from seeing how very red it was.

The water struck her suddenly; big waves washed right up against her, ice-cold, immensely powerful and then dying away all at once as if sucked back by the wind. She was lying in the surf! And the sun rose beyond the high stack of glowing clouds in the east, and gradually spread across the blue sky.

“Ah, do you see it?” she whispered.

“I’m sorry, my darling,” he said to her. He stood way way far away, a wraith against the brightness, so dark himself that she could make out nothing, except his long hair blowing. And then it came back to her, how silky his hair was, how very fine and black, and how good it smelled. But he was just a distant figure now. There was the fragrance, naturally; and there was the voice; that was all.

“I’m sorry, my precious. I wanted for it to live. And I know that you tried. I’m sorry, my darling deaf, my beloved Gifford. I didn’t mean to hurt you. And we both tried. Lord. God, forgive me! What am I to do, Gifford?”

Silence. Again came the waves.

Was he gone? Her willowy Christ with his soft hair, who’d been talking to her for so long? The water washed over her face. It felt so good. What had he told her, something about going down into the little town, and seeing the crèche there, with the little plaster Christ Child in the hay, and all the brothers in their brown robes. He had not asked to be a priest, only one of the brothers. “But you are meant for better things.”

It cut right through the pain for a moment, that sense of lost hours, lost words and images, she too had been to Assisi, she had told him. St. Francis was her saint. Would he get the medal for her? Out of her purse? It was St. Michael, but she wanted it. He’d understand. If you understood about St. Francis you understood about St. Michael. You understood about all saints. She had meant to ask, but he had been talking on and on about the songs he used to sing, songs in Italian, and the Latin hymn, naturally, about the sunny hills of Italy and then that dark cold mist hanging over Donnelaith.

She felt nausea and tasted salt on her lips. And her hands were painfully cold. The water stung her! It came again, rolling her to the left, so that the sand hurt her cheek, and the pain in her belly was unbearable. Oh, God, you cannot feel pain like this and not…what? Help me.

She fell again to the right; she looked out into the glare of the Gulf; she looked into the full blaze of the morning. Lord God, it had all been true and she had failed to stop it, and now it had reached out through the great tangled mass of whispered secrets and threats and it had killed her.

But what will Ryan do without me? What will happen to Pierce if I’m not there? Clancy needs me. They can’t have the wedding if this happens to me! It will ruin everything for them! Where in the name of God is Rowan? And which church would they use? They shouldn’t go back to St. Alphonsus. Rowan!

How busy she was suddenly, making lists and charts, and drifting, and meaning to call Shelby and Lilia, and when the water came again, she didn’t mind the salt so much or the numbing chill of it. Alicia didn’t know where the Victrola was! Nobody did but Gifford. And the napkins for the wedding. There were hundreds of linen napkins in the attic at First Street, and they could be used for the wedding, if only Rowan would come home and say that-Good heavens, the only one she didn’t have to worry about was Mona. Mona would be fine. Mona didn’t really need her. Mona…!

Ah, the water felt good. No, she didn’t mind it, not a bit, as they say. Where was the emerald? Did you take it with you, Rowan? He’d given her the medal. She had it around her neck, but getting her hand up there to clasp the chain was now out of the question. What was required now was an entire inventory, including the Victrola and the pearls and the emerald and those records of Oncle Julien’s, all those old Victrola songs, and the dress in the attic in the box which had belonged to Ancient Evelyn. She turned her face this time into the water, thinking that it was probably washing the blood away from her, and off her hand.

No, didn’t mind the cold water. Never had. She just minded the pain, the awful sharpening and grinding pain. You think life is worth it? I don’t know. What do you think? This pain, it’s not particularly unusual, you know, to feel pain like this, to feel this suffering, it’s nothing special, you know, it’s just. I don’t know if it’s worth it. I really really don’t.