Lasher

Eight

IT WAS NOT her custom to speak into the phone when she answered it. She would pick up the receiver, hold it to her ear; then if someone spoke, someone she knew, perhaps she would answer.

Ryan knew this. And he said immediately into the silence: “Ancient Evelyn, something dreadful has happened.”

“What is it, son?” she asked, identifying herself with an uncommon warmth. Her voice sounded frail and small to her, not the voice of herself which she had always known.

“They’ve found Gifford on the beach at Destin. They said-” Ryan’s voice broke and he could not continue. Then Ryan’s son, Pierce, came on the line and he said that he and his father were driving up together. Ryan came back on the phone. Ryan told her she must stay with Alicia, that Alicia would go mad when she “heard.”

“I understand,” said Ancient Evelyn. And she did. Gifford wasn’t merely hurt. Gifford was dead. “I will find Mona,” she said softly. She did not know if they even heard.

Ryan said something vague and confused and rushed, that they would call her later, that Lauren was calling “the family.” And then the conversation was finished, and Ancient Evelyn put down the phone and went to the closet for her walking stick.

Ancient Evelyn did not much like Lauren Mayfair. Lauren Mayfair was a brittle, arrogant lawyer in Ancient Evelyn’s book, a sterile, frosty businesswoman of the worst sort who had always preferred legal documents to people. But she would be fine for calling everyone. Except for Mona. And Mona was not here, and Mona had to be told.

Mona was up at the First Street house. Ancient Evelyn knew it. Perhaps Mona was searching for that Victrola and the beautiful pearls.

Ancient Evelyn had known all night that Mona was out. But she never really had to worry about Mona. Mona would do all the things in life that everyone wanted to do. She would do them for her grandmother Laura Lee and for her mother, CeeCee, and for Ancient Evelyn herself. She would do them for Gifford…

Gifford dead. No, that did not seem possible, or likely. Why did I not feel it when it happened? Why didn’t I hear her voice?

Back to the practical things. Ancient Evelyn stood in the hallway, thinking whether she ought to go on her own in search of Mona, to go out on the bumpy streets, the sidewalks of brick and flag on which she might fall, but never had, and then she thought with her new eyes she could do it. Yes, and who knew? It might be her last time to really see.

A year ago, she could not have seen to walk downtown. But young Dr. Rhodes had taken the cataracts from her eyes. And now she saw so well it astonished people. That is, when she told them what she saw, which she didn’t often do.

Ancient Evelyn knew perfectly well that talking made little difference. Ancient Evelyn didn’t talk for years on end. People took it in stride. People did what they wanted. No one would let Ancient Evelyn tell Mona her stories anyway, and Ancient Evelyn had deepened into her memories of the early times, and she did not always need anymore to examine or explain them.

What good had it done besides to tell Alicia and Gifford her tales? What had their lives been? And Gifford’s life was over!

It seemed astonishing again that Gifford could be dead. Completely dead. Yes, Alicia will go mad, she thought, but then so will Mona. And so will I when I really know.

Ancient Evelyn went into Alicia’s room. Alicia slept, curled up like a child. In the night, she’d gotten up and drunk half a flask of whiskey down as if it were medicine. That sort of drinking could kill you. Alicia should have died, thought Ancient Evelyn. That is what was meant to be. The horse passed the wrong gate.

She laid the knitted cover over Alicia’s shoulders and went out.

Slowly, she went down the stairway, very very slowly, carefully examining each tread with the rubber tip of her cane, pushing and poking at the carpet to make sure there was nothing lurking there that would trip her and make her fall. On her eightieth birthday she had fallen. It had been the worst time of her old age, lying in bed as the hip mended. But it had done her heart good, Dr. Rhodes had told her. “You will live to be one hundred.”

Dr. Rhodes had fought the others when they said she was too old for the cataract operation. “She is going blind, don’t you understand? I can make her see again. And her mentation is perfect.”

Mentation-she had liked that word, she had told him so.

“Why don’t you talk to them more?” he’d asked her in the hospital. “You know they think you’re a feebleminded old woman.”

She had laughed and laughed. “But I am,” she had said, “and the ones I loved to talk to are all gone. Now there’s only Mona. And most of the time, Mona talks to me.”

How he had laughed at that.

Ancient Evelyn had grown up speaking as little as possible. The truth was Ancient Evelyn might never have spoken much to a soul if it hadn’t been for Julien.

And the one thing she did want to do was tell Mona someday all about Julien. Maybe today should be that day. It struck her with a shimmering power! Tell Mona. The Victrola and the pearls are in that house. Mona can have them now.

She stopped before the mirrored hat rack in the alcove. She was satisfied; yes, ready to go out. She had slept all night in her warm gabardine dress and it would be fine in this mild spring weather. She was not rumpled at all. It was so easy to sleep sitting up perfectly straight, with her hands crossed on her knee. She put a handkerchief against the tapestried back of the chair, by her cheek as she turned her head, in case anything came out of her mouth as she slept. But there was rarely a stain upon the cloth. She could use the same handkerchief over and over.

She did not have a hat. But it had been years since she had gone out-except for Rowan Mayfair’s wedding-and she did not know what Alicia had done with her hats. Surely there had been one for the wedding, and if she tried she might recollect what it looked like, probably gray with an old-fashioned little veil. Probably had pink flowers. But maybe she was dreaming. The wedding itself hadn’t seemed very real.

Surely she could not climb the stairs again to look for a hat now, and there were none in her little back room down here. Besides, her hair was done. It was the same soft bouffant she had made of it for years, and she could feel that the coil on the back of her head was firm, pins in place. It made a grand white frame for her face, her hair. She had never regretted its turning white. No, she did not require a hat. As for gloves, there were none now and no one would buy them for her.

At Rowan Mayfair’s wedding, that horrid Lauren Mayfair had even said, “Nobody wears gloves anymore,” as if it didn’t matter. Perhaps Lauren was right.

Ancient Evelyn didn’t mind so terribly about the gloves. She had her brooches and her pins. Her stockings were not wrinkled at all. Her shoes were tied. Mona had tied them yesterday very tight. She was ready to go. She did not look at her face; she never did anymore because it wasn’t her face, it was someone else’s old and wrinkled face, with deep vertical lines, very solemn and cold, and drooping lids, and the skin was too large for the bones underneath, and her eyebrows and her chin had lost their contour.

She would prefer to think about the walk ahead. It made her happy merely to think of it, and that Gifford was gone, and if Ancient Evelyn fell, or was struck down, or became lost, there was no more granddaughter Gifford to become hysterical. It felt wonderful to her suddenly to be free of Gifford’s love-as if a gate had opened wide once more on the world. And Mona would eventually know this too, this relief, this release. But not immediately.

She went down the long, high hall, and opened the front door. It had been a year since she’d gone down the front steps, except for the wedding, and someone had carried her then. There was no rail now to hold to. The banisters had just rotted away years ago and Alicia and Patrick had done nothing about it, except tear them off and throw them under the house.

“My great-grandfather built this house!” she had declared. “He ordered those balusters himself, picked them from the catalogue. And look what you have allowed to happen.” Damn them all.

And damn him too, when she thought about it. How she had hated him, the giant shadow over her childhood, raving Tobias, hissing at her when he snatched up her hand and held it: “Witch, witch’s mark, look at it.” Pinching that tiny sixth finger. She had never answered him, only loathed him in silence. She had never spoken one word to him all of his life.

But a house falling to ruin, that was something more important than whether you hated the person who built it. Why, building this house was maybe the only good thing Tobias Mayfair had ever done. Fontevrault, their once beautiful plantation, had died out in the swampland, or so she had been told every time she asked to be taken to see it. “That old house? The Bayou flooded it!” But then maybe they were lying. What if she could walk all the way to Fontevrault, and find the house standing there.

That was a dream surely. But Amelia Street stood mighty and beautiful on its corner on the Avenue. And something ought to be done, be done, be done…

Banister or no banister, she could manage perfectly well with her cane, especially now that she could see so clearly. She took the steps easily. And went directly down the path and opened the iron picket gate. Imagine. She was walking away from the house for the first time in all these years.

Squinting at the glimmer of traffic in the distance, she crossed the lakeside of the Avenue at once. She had to wait a moment on the riverside, but soon her chance came.

She had always liked the riverside as they called it. And she knew that Patrick was in the restaurant on the corner, drinking and eating his breakfast as he always did.

She crossed Amelia Street and the tiny street called Antonine which came in there only a few feet from Amelia, and she stood on the corner and looked through the glass windows of the restaurant. There was Patrick-scrawny and pale-at the end table, as always, with his beer and his eggs, and the newspaper. He did not even see her. He would stay there, drinking beer and reading the paper for half the day, and then go downtown for a little while perhaps and drink some more in a bar he liked in the Quarter. In the late afternoon, Alicia might wake up and call Patrick at the bar and begin to scream for him to come home.

So he was there, and he did not see her. How could he? Would he ever have expected Ancient Evelyn to leave the house of her own accord?

That was perfectly fine, exactly what she wanted. And on she walked down the block, unseen, unstopped, towards downtown.

How clear were the black-barked oaks, and the beaten down grass of the tree parks. She saw the clutter and trash of Mardi Gras still piled everywhere in the gutters, and in the trash cans which were never enough to contain it.

She walked on, past the drab shabby portable bathrooms they brought out now for Mardi Gras Day, catching the wretched smell of all that filth, and on and on to Louisiana Avenue. Litter everywhere she looked, and from the high branches of the trees hung Mardi Gras necklaces of plastic beads, the kind they threw now, glittering in the sunlight. There was nothing so sorry in the world ever, she thought, as St. Charles Avenue after Mardi Gras Day.

She waited for the stoplight to change. An old colored woman, very properly dressed, waited there also. “Good morning, Patricia,” she said to the woman, and the woman gave a start beneath her black straw hat.

“Why, Miss Ancient Evelyn. What are you doing all the way down here?”

“I’m walking down to the Garden District. I will be fine, Patricia. I have my cane. I wish I had my gloves and my hat, but I do not.”

“That’s a shame, Miss Ancient Evelyn,” said the old woman, very proper, her voice soft and mellow. She was a sweet old thing, Patricia, came by all the time with her little grandchild, who could have passed for white, but didn’t, obviously, or maybe had yet to figure it all out.

Something terribly exciting had happened.

“Oh, I’ll be all right,” Ancient Evelyn said. “My niece is up there, in the Garden District. I have to give her the Victrola.” And then she realized that Patricia knew nothing about these things! That Patricia had stopped many a time at the gate to speak, but she did not know the whole story. How could she? Ancient Evelyn had thought for a moment she was speaking to someone who knew.

Patricia was still talking, but Ancient Evelyn didn’t hear the words. The light was green. She had to cross.

And off she went as rapidly as she could, skirting the raised strip of concrete that divided the street, because stepping up and stepping down would be needlessly hard for her.

She was too slow for the light of course, that had been true twenty years ago, when she still made this walk all the time to pass the First Street house and look at poor Deirdre.

All the young ones of that generation doomed, she thought-sacrificed, as it were, to the viciousness and stupidity of Carlotta Mayfair. Carlotta Mayfair drugged and killed her niece Deirdre. But why think of it now?

It seemed Ancient Evelyn was plagued with a thousand confusing thoughts.

Cortland, Julien’s beloved son, dead from a fall down the steps-that was all Carlotta’s fault, too, wasn’t it? They’d brought him into Touro only two blocks away. Ancient Evelyn had been sitting on the porch. She could see the top of the brick walls of the hospital from her very chair, and what a shock it had been to learn that Cortland had died there, only two blocks away, talking to strangers in the emergency room.

And to think that Cortland had been Ancient Evelyn’s father. Ah, well, that had never mattered, not really. Julien had mattered, yes, and Stella, but fathers and mothers, no.

Barbara Ann had died giving birth to Ancient Evelyn. That was no mother, really. Only a cameo, a silhouette, a portrait in oils. “See? That’s your mother.” A trunk full of old clothes, and a rosary and some unfinished embroidery that might have been for a sachet.

How Ancient Evelyn’s mind wandered. But she had been counting murders, hadn’t she? The murders committed by Carlotta Mayfair who was now dead, thank God, and gone.

The murder of Stella, that had been the worst of them all. That Carlotta had most definitely done. Surely that had to be laid on Carlotta’s conscience. And in the rosy days of 1914, Evelyn and Julien had known such terrible things were coming, but there had been nothing either of them could do.

For one brief instant, Ancient Evelyn saw the words of the poem again, same way she had seen them on that long-ago day when she had recited them aloud to Julien in his attic bedroom. “I see it. I do not know what it means.”

Pain and suffering as they stumble

Blood and fear before they learn.

Woe betide this Springtime Eden

Now the vale of those who mourn.

Ah, what a day this was. So much was coming back to her, and yet the present itself was so fresh and sweet. The breeze so good to her.

On and on, Ancient Evelyn walked.

Here was the vacant lot at Toledano. Would they never build anything else there, and look at these apartment buildings, so plain, so ugly, where once glorious mansions had stood, houses grander than her own. Oh, to think of all those people gone since the days when she took Gifford and Alicia downtown, or the other way to the park, walking between them. But the Avenue did keep its beauty. The streetcar rattled into view even as she spoke, and then roared round the bend-the Avenue was one endless curve, just as it had been all of Ancient Evelyn’s life from the time she rode it to go up to First Street. Of course she could not step up on the streetcar now. That was out of the question.

She could not now remember when she stopped riding the car, except that it was decades ago. She’d nearly fallen one night when she was coming home, and dropped her sacks from Marks Isaacs and Maison Blanche and the conductor himself had had to come and help her up. Very embarrassing and upsetting to her it had been. Silent as usual, she had given the conductor her special nod, and touched his hand.

Then the car had rushed away, in a sweep of wind, and she’d been left alone on the neutral ground, and the oncoming traffic had seemed endless and impossible to defeat-the big house in another world on the other side of the street.

“And would you have believed it then if they’d told you you’d live to see another twenty years, to see Deirdre buried and dead, to see poor Gifford dead?”

She had thought sure she’d die the year that Stella died. And then when Laura Lee died it was the same way. Her only daughter. She thought if she stopped talking, death could come and take her.

But it hadn’t happened. Alicia and Gifford had needed her. Then Alicia had married. And Mona needed her. Mona’s birth had given Ancient Evelyn a new voice.

Oh, she didn’t want to be considering things in such a perspective. Not on such a lovely morning. She did try to speak to people. It was simply so unnatural a thing for her to do.

She’d hear the others speaking to her, or more truly she saw their lips move and she knew they wanted her attention. But she could stay in her dreams, walking through the streets of Rome with her arm around Stella’s waist, or lying with her in the little room at the hotel, and kissing so gently and endlessly in the shadows, just woman and woman, her breasts pressed softly against Stella’s.

Oh, that had been the richest time. Thank God she had not known how pale it would all be…after. She would only know the wide world once, really, and with Stella, and when Stella died, the world did too.

Which had been the greatest love of her prime? Julien in the locked room or Stella of the great adventures? She could not make up her mind.

One thing was true. It was Julien who haunted her, Julien she saw in her waking dreams, Julien’s voice she heard. There was a time when she was sure Julien was going to come right up the front steps the way he had when she was thirteen, pushing her great-grandfather out of the way. “Let that girl out, you bloody fool!” And she in the attic had shivered in fear. Julien come to take me away. It would make sense, wouldn’t it? Julien hovering about her still. “Crank the Victrola, Evelyn. Say my name.”

Stella was more abruptly and totally gone with her tragic death, vanished into a sweet and agonizing grief, as though she had with her last breath truly ascended into heaven. Surely Stella went to heaven. How could anyone who made so many people happy go to hell? Poor Stella. She had never been a real witch, only a child. Maybe gentle souls like Stella did not want to haunt you; maybe they found the light quickly and far better things to do. Stella was memories, yes, but never a ghost.

In the hotel room in Rome, Stella had put her hand between Evelyn’s legs, and said, “No, don’t be frightened. Let me touch you. Yes, let me see you.” Parting Evelyn’s legs. “Don’t be ashamed. Don’t be afraid, with a woman there is never any cause to be afraid. You should know that. Besides, wasn’t Oncle Julien gentle?”

“If only we could shut the blinds,” Evelyn had pleaded. “It’s the light, it’s the noise from the piazza. I don’t know.” But in fact, her body had been stirring and she wanted Stella. It had only just struck her that she could touch Stella all over with her own hands, that she could suckle Stella’s breasts and let Stella’s weight fall down on her. How she loved Stella. She could have drowned in Stella.

And in a true and deep way Ancient Evelyn’s life had ended on that night when Stella was shot in 1929.

She had seen Stella fall on the living room floor and that man from the Talamasca, that Arthur Langtry, run to take the gun from Lionel Mayfair’s hand. That man from the Talamasca had died at sea only a little while after. Poor fool, she thought. And Stella had hoped to escape with him, to run off to Europe and leave Lasher with her child. Oh, Stella, to think that such a thing could be done, how foolish and terrible. Ancient Evelyn had tried to warn Stella about those men from Europe who kept their secret books and charts; she’d tried to explain that Stella must not talk to them. Carlotta knew, Evelyn had to give her that, though for all the wrong reasons.

And now there was one of those men about again, and nobody suspected anything. Aaron Lightner was his name; they talked about him as though he were a saint because he had the records of the clan all the way back to Donnelaith. What did any of them know about Donnelaith? Julien had hinted of terrible things in a hushed voice as they lay together, with the music playing in the background. Julien had gone to that place in Scotland. The others had not.

Ancient Evelyn might have died even with his passing, if it hadn’t been for little Laura Lee. She wasn’t going to leave her daughter. Some baby was always catching hold of her, and drawing her back in. Laura Lee. Now Mona. And would she live to see Mona’s child?

Stella had come with a dress for Laura Lee, and to take her to school. Suddenly she’d said, “My darling, forget about all this rubbish, sending her to school. Poor little creature. I always hated school. You two come with us to Europe. Come with me and Lionel. You can’t spend your life on one single corner of the world.”

Evelyn would have never seen Rome or Paris or London or any of those marvelous places to which Stella took her, Stella her beloved, Stella who was not faithful but devoted, teaching her that the latter was the thing.

Evelyn had worn a gray silk dress the night of Stella’s death, with ropes of pearls, Stella’s pearls, and she had gone out onto the grass and sunk down weeping as they took Lionel away. The dress had been utterly ruined. Glass broken all around the house. And Stella a little heap on the waxed floor, with flashbulbs exploding all around her. Stella lying where they had all danced, and that Talamasca man so horrified, rushing away. Horrified…

Julien, did you foresee this? Has the poem been fulfilled? Evelyn had cried and cried, and later when no one was about, when they had taken Stella’s body away, when all was quiet, and the First Street house was plunged into darkness and the random glitter of the broken glass, Evelyn had crept to the library and pulled out the books and opened Stella’s secret hiding place in the library wall.

Here Stella had hidden all their pictures, their letters, all the things she meant to keep from Carlotta. “We don’t want her knowing about us, ducky, but I’ll be damned if I’ll burn our pictures.”

Evelyn had taken off the long ropes of pearls that were Stella’s and put them there in the dark cavity, with the little keepsakes of their soft and shining romance.

“Why can’t we love each other always, Stella?” She had cried on the boat home.

“Oh, my darling, the real world will never accept,” Stella had said. She’d been already having an affair with a man on board. “But we shall meet. I shall arrange a little place downtown for us together.”

Stella had been true to her word, and what an enchanting little courtyard apartment it had been, and only for them.

Laura Lee had been back in school all day, no trouble. Laura Lee had never suspected a thing.

It had rather amused Evelyn-she and Stella making love in that little cluttered place, with its bare brick walls, and the noise of the restaurant beyond, and none of the Mayfair clan knowing a thing about it. Love you, my darling.

It was only to Stella that Evelyn had ever shown Julien’s Victrola. Only Stella knew that Evelyn had taken it from the First Street house at Julien’s command. Julien the ghost who was ever close to her, whenever she imagined him, the feel of his hair, the touch of his skin.

For years after his death, Evelyn had crept up to her room, and wound the Victrola. She’d put on the records and played the waltz; she’d closed her eyes and imagined she danced with Julien-so sprightly and graceful in his old age, so ready to laugh at the ironies of it all, so patient with the weaknesses and deceptions of others. She’d played the waltz for little Laura Lee.

“Your father gave me this record,” she had told her daughter. The child’s face was so sad, it could make her cry just to look at Laura Lee’s face. Had Laura Lee ever known happiness? She’d known peace and perhaps that was just as good.

Could Julien hear the Victrola? Was he really bound to the earth by his own will? “There are dark times ahead, Evie. But I will not give up. I will not go quietly into hell and let him triumph. I will overreach death if I can, same as he has done. I will thrive in the shadows. Play the song for me so that I might hear it, so that it might call me back.”

Stella had been so puzzled to hear about it, years after, when they ate spaghetti and drank wine, and listened to the Dixieland in the little place in the Quarter-Evelyn’s old tales of Julien.

“So you were the one who took that little Victrola! Ah, yes, I remember, but Evie, I think you’re all mixed up about the rest. He was always so gay around us, Evelyn, are you sure he was so frightened?

“Of course I do remember the day Mother burnt his books. He was so angry! So angry. And then we went to get you. Do you remember. I think I told him you were in the attic up there at Amelia, a prisoner, just so he would get angry enough not to die on the couch that very afternoon. All those books. I wonder what was in them. But he was happy after that, Evie, especially after you started coming. Happy till the end.”

“Yes, happy,” Evelyn had declared. “He was right in his head till the day he died.”

In her mind’s eye, she was in that time once more. She grabbed the tangled, thorny vines, climbing higher and higher up the stucco wall. Oh, to be that strong again, even for a moment, to step up to one bar of the trellis after another, fingers tugging on the vines, pushing through the wet flowers, until she had reached the roof of the second floor porch, all the way above those flagstones, and saw Julien, through the window, in his brass bed.

“Evalynn!” he’d said peering through the glass to welcome her, reaching out for her. She’d never told Stella about all that.

Evelyn had been thirteen when Julien first brought her to that room.

In a way, that day had been the first of her true life. To Julien she could talk the way she couldn’t to other people. How powerless she had been in her silence, only now and then breaking it when her grandfather beat her, or the others begged her and then mostly to speak in rhymes. Why, she wasn’t speaking them at all really, she was reading the words from the air.

Julien had asked to hear her strange poetry, her prophecy. Julien had been afraid. He had known of the dark times to come.

But oh, they had been so carefree in their own way, the old man and the mute child. In the afternoon, he’d made love to her very slowly, a little heavier and clumsier than Stella later on, yes, but then, he’d been an old man, hadn’t he? He’d apologized that it had taken him so long to finish, but what delights he’d given her with his nether kisses and embraces, with his skilled fingers, and the secret little erotic words he spoke into her ear as he touched her. That was the thing about them both, they knew how to touch you and kiss you.

They made of love a soft and luxurious thing. And when the violence came you were ready. You wanted it.

“Dark times,” he said. “I can’t tell you all, my pretty girl. I don’t dare to explain it. She’s burnt my books, you know, right out there on the grass. She burnt what was mine. She burnt my life when she did that. But I want you to do this for me, believe in this for me. Take the Victrola out of this house. You must keep it, in memory of me. It’s mine, this thing, I have loved it, touched it, imbued it with my spirit as surely as any stumbling mortal can imbue an object with spirit. Keep it safe, Eve, play the waltz for me.

“Pass it on to those who would cherish it after Mary Beth is gone. Mary Beth can’t live forever any more than I can. Never let Carlotta get it. A time will come…”

And then he’d sunk into sadness again. Better to make love.

“I cannot help it,” he had said. “I see but I can do nothing. I do not know any more than any man what is really possible. What if hell is utterly solitary? What if there is no one there to hate? What if it’s like the dark night over Donnelaith, Scotland? Then Lasher comes from hell.”

“Did he really say all that, now?” asked Stella, years later, and only a month after that very conversation, Stella herself had been shot and killed. Stella whose eyes closed forever in the year 1929.

So much life since the death of Stella. So many generations. So much world.

Sometimes it was a downright consolation to hear her beloved redhaired Mona Mayfair railing against modernism.

“We’ve had nearly an entire century, you realize, and the most coherent and successful styles were developed in those first twenty years. Stella saw it. If she saw art deco, if she heard jazz, if she saw a Kandinsky, she saw the twentieth century. What have we had since? Look at these ads for this hotel in Miami. Might as well have been done in 1923 when you were running around with Stella.”

Yes, Mona was a consolation in more ways than one.

“Well, ducky, you know, I might run off to England with this man from the Talamasca,” Stella had said in those last weeks of her life. She’d stopped eating her spaghetti as if this were something to be decided then and there, with fork in hand. To run from First Street, run from Lasher, seek help from these strange scholars.

“But Julien warned against those men. Stella, he said they were the alchemists in my poem. He said they would only hurt us in the long run. Stella, he used that word, he said not to speak with them ever at all!”

“You know, this Talamasca man or whatever he is, he’s going to find out about that other one, that the body’s in the attic. When you’re a Mayfair you can kill anyone you want, and nobody does anything about it. Nobody can think what to do.” She’d shrugged, and a month later her brother Lionel killed her. No more Stella.

No more anyone who knew about the Victrola or Julien with Evelyn in Julien’s bedroom. Evelyn’s only living witness gone to the grave.

It had not been a simple thing, during Julien’s last illness, to get the Victrola out of the house. He’d waited for a time when Mary Beth and Carlotta were not at home, and then sent the boys down to fetch another “music box,” as he stubbornly called it, from the dining room.

And only when he had a record ready to play full blast on the big one, did he tell her to take the little Victrola and run away. He’d told her to sing as she walked with it, sing as if it were playing, just sing and sing aloud until she reached her house uptown.

“People will think I am crazy,” she had said softly. She had looked at her hands, her left hand with the extra finger-witches’ marks.

“Do you care what they think?” His smile had always been so beautiful. Only in sleep did he look his age. He had cranked the big music box. “You take these records of my opera-I have others-take them under your arm, you can do it. Take it uptown, my darling. If I could be a gentleman and carry the whole load for you up to your attic, you can be sure I would. Now, here, when you get to the Avenue, flag a taxi. Give him this. Let him carry the thing inside.”

And there she was singing that song, singing along with the big music box, while carrying the little one out of the house.

Out she had walked, like an altar boy in a procession, carrying the precious thing.

She’d carried it until her arms ached so much she couldn’t go any further. Had to set down the burden on the corner of Prytania and Fourth Street, and sit there on the curb with her elbows on her knees and rest for a while. Traffic whizzing by. Finally she had stopped a taxi, though she had never done such a thing before, and when she got home, the man had brought the Victrola all the way up to the attic for the five dollars Julien had given her. “Thank you, ma’am!”

The darkest of days had been right after his death, when Mary Beth had come to ask if she had “anything of Julien’s,” if she had taken anything from his room. She had shaken her head, refusing as always to answer. Mary Beth had known she was lying. “What did Julien give you?” she asked.

Evelyn had sat on the floor of her attic room, her back to the armoire, which was locked, with the Victrola inside, refusing to answer. Julien is dead, that was all she could think, Julien is dead.

She hadn’t even known then about the child inside her, about Laura Lee, poor doomed Laura Lee. At night, she walked the streets in silence, burning for Julien, and dared not play the Victrola while any light burned in the big Amelia Street house at all.

Years later, when Stella died, it was as if the old wound opened, and they became one-the loss of her two brilliant loves, the loss of the only warm light which had ever penetrated her life’s mysteries, the loss of the music, the loss of all fire.

“Don’t try to make her talk,” her great-grandfather had said to Mary Beth. “You go out of here. You go back up to your house. You leave us alone. We don’t want you here. If there is anything of that abominable man in this house, I’ll destroy it.”

Oh, such a cruel cruel man. He would have killed Laura Lee if he could have. “Witches!” Once he’d taken a kitchen knife and threatened to cut the little extra finger off Evelyn’s hand. How she’d screamed. The others had to stop him-Pearl, and Aurora, and all the old ones from Fontevrault who’d still been there.

But Tobias had been the worst of them, as well as the eldest. How he hated Julien, and all over the gunshot in 1843, when Julien had shot his father, Augustin, at Riverbend, Julien no more than a boy, Augustin a young man, and Tobias, the terrified witness, only a baby still in dresses. That’s the way they dressed boys then, in dresses. “I saw my father fall over dead at my feet!”

“I never meant to kill him,” Julien had told Evelyn as they lay in bed. “I never meant for one whole branch of the family to veer off in bitterness and rage, and everyone else has been trying to get them back ever since, but somehow there are two camps. There is here, and there is Amelia Street. I feel so sorry when I think of all that. I was just a boy, and the fool didn’t know how to run the plantation. I have no compunction about shooting people, you understand, only that time I didn’t plan it, honestly I did not. I did not mean to kill your great-great-grandfather. It was all just the most blundering mistake.”

She had not cared. She hated Tobias. She hated all of them. Old men.

Yet it was with an old man that love had first touched her, in Julien’s attic.

And then there were those nights when she had walked downtown in the dark to that house, climbed the wall, and gone up, hand over hand on the trellis. So easy to climb so high, to swing out and stare down at the flags.

The flags on which poor Antha died. But that had been yet to come, all that, those horrible deaths-Stella, Antha.

It would always be pleasant to remember the thick green vine and the softness of it under her slipper as she climbed.

“Ah, Chérie,” he said. “My delight, my wild thing,” and he raised the window to receive her, to bring her inside. “Mon Dieu, child, you could have fallen.”

“Never,” she whispered. Safe in his arms.

Even Richard Llewellyn, that boy he kept, didn’t come between them. Richard knew to knock on Julien’s door, and one was never sure what Richard Llewellyn knew, really. Years ago Richard Llewellyn had talked to that last Talamasca man, though Evelyn had warned him not to. Richard had come up to see her the next day.

“Well, you didn’t tell him about me, did you?” Ancient Evelyn had demanded. Richard was so old. He didn’t have very long.

“No, I didn’t tell him that story. I didn’t want him to think-”

“What? That Julien would bed a girl my age?” She had laughed. “You shouldn’t have talked to that man at all.” Richard hadn’t lasted out the year, and when he died, they gave her his old records. He must have known about the Victrola, why else would he have left those old records to her?

Evelyn should have given Mona the little Victrola a long time ago, and not with such ceremony in front of the other two, her idiot granddaughters, Alicia and Gifford. Leave it to Gifford to confiscate everything-the music box itself and the beautiful necklace.

“You dare!”

Leave it to Gifford to have made the very wrong choice, leave it to Gifford to misunderstand. To gasp in horror when Ancient Evelyn had said the poem. “Why would he want you to have this? What did he think it could do? He was a witch and you know it. A witch as surely as the others.”

And then the terrible confession from Gifford, that she had gone and taken those things and hidden them back up at First Street, in that house whence they’d come.

“You little fool, how could you do such a thing?” Ancient Evelyn had asked. “Mona should have had it! Mona is his great-granddaughter! Gifford, not back to that house where Carlotta will find it, where it will be destroyed.”

She remembered suddenly. Gifford had died this morning!

She was walking on St. Charles Avenue, going up to First Street, and her aggravating, annoying, grating, nerve-wracking grandchild was dead!

“Why didn’t I know it? Julien, why didn’t you come to tell me!”

Well over half a century ago, she’d heard Julien’s voice an hour before his death. She’d heard him calling from beneath her window. She’d sprung up and opened it wide to the rain, and there was Julien down there, only at once she knew it wasn’t really Julien. She’d been terrified he was already dead. He had waved at her, so cheerful and gay, with a big dark mare beside him. “Au revoir, ma Chérie,” he had called out.

And then she had gone to him, running all the way those ten blocks downtown, and climbed the trellis, and for those precious moments seen his eyes-the life still in them-fixed on her. Oh, Julien, I heard you calling me. I saw you. I saw the embodiment of your love. She had raised the window. She had lifted him.

“Eve,” he had whispered. “Evie, I want to sit up. Evie, help me, I’m dying, Evie! It’s happening, it’s come!”

They had never known she was there.

She’d crouched outside on the porch roof in the fury of the storm, listening to them. They’d never thought to even look outside as they closed the window and laid him out, and sent for everyone. And there she’d been huddled against the chimney, watching the lightning and thinking, Why don’t you strike me? Why don’t I die? Julien is dead.

“What did he give you?” Mary Beth had asked her every time she saw her. Year after year she came.

Mary Beth had stared at little Laura Lee, such a weak, thin baby, never a baby that people wanted to hold. Mary Beth had always known that Julien had been Laura Lee’s father.

And how the others had hated her. “Julien’s spawn, look at her, with the witch’s mark on her hand, look, like you!”

It wasn’t so bad, just a tiny extra finger. Why, most people had never noticed it, though Laura Lee had been so self-conscious, and no one at Sacred Heart knew what it meant.

“The mark of the witch,” Tobias used to say. “There are many. Red hair is the worst, and a sixth finger the second, and a monster’s height, the third. And you with the sixth finger. Go live up at First Street, live with the damned who gave you your talents. Get out of my house.”

Of course she had never gone, not with Carlotta there! Better to ignore the old men as she and her little daughter went about their business. Laura Lee had been too sickly ever to finish high school. Poor Laura Lee, who spent her life taking in stray cats, and talking to them, and going round the block to find them and feed them, until the neighbors complained. She’d been too old by the time she married; and to be left with those two girls!

Were we the powerful witches, those of us who bore the mark of the sixth finger? What about Mona with her red hair?

As the years passed the great Mayfair legacy had gone to Stella and then to Antha and then to Deirdre…

All of them lost, who had lived in the times of shadows. Even the bright blaze of Stella pinched out, like that!

“But there will come another time. A time of battle and catastrophe.” That Julien had promised her the last night she had really spoken with him. “That’s the meaning of your poem, Evelyn. I shall try to be here.”

The music whined and thumped. He was always playing it.

“You see, Chérie, I have a secret about him and music. He cannot hear us so well when we play music. It’s an old secret, my grandmère Marie Claudette told me herself.

“The evil daemon is actually drawn to the music. Music can distract him. He can hear music when he can hear nothing else. Rhythm and rhyme can also entrap him. All ghosts find such things irresistible, as they do visible patterns. In their gloom, they pine for order, for symmetry. I use the music to draw him and confuse him. Mary Beth knows this too. Why do you think there are music boxes in every room? Why do you think she loves her many Victrolas? They give her privacy from this being, which she would have now and then, just as anyone would.

“And when I am gone, child, play the Victrola. Play it and think of me. Perhaps I can hear it, perhaps I can come to you, perhaps the waltz will penetrate the darkness, and bring me back to myself and to you.”

“Julien, why do you call him evil? They always said at home that the spirit in this house was yours to command. Tobias said it to Walker. They said it to me when they told me Cortland was my father. Lasher was the magic slave of Julien and Mary Beth, they said, which will grant their every wish.”

He’d shaken his head, talking under cover of a Neapolitan song. “He’s evil, mark my word, and the worst kind of evil, but he does not know it himself. Recite the poem again. Tell it to me.”

Ancient Evelyn had hated to say the poem. The poem came from her as if she were the Victrola and someone had touched her with an invisible needle, and out came the words, and she did not know what they meant. Words that frightened Julien, and had frightened his niece Carlotta beforehand, words that Julien said over and over again as the months passed.

How vigorous he had looked, his white curly hair still very thick, his eyes very clever and focused upon her. He’d never suffered the blindness and deafness of old age, had he? Was it his many loves that kept him young? Perhaps so. He’d laid his soft dry hand over hers, and kissed her cheek.

“Soon I shall die like everyone else, and there’s nothing I can do about it.”

Oh, that precious year, those precious few months.

And to think of him coming to her, young in that vision. That she’d heard his voice all the way up at her window. And there he’d stood in the rain, all chipper and handsome and beaming at her as he held the bridle of his horse. “Au revoir, ma Chérie.”

Afterwards little visions of him came so fast they were like the pop of flashbulbs. Julien on the streetcar passing by. Julien in a car. Julien in the cemetery at Antha’s funeral. All make-believe perhaps. Why, she could have sworn she glimpsed him for one precious second at Stella’s funeral.

Is that why she’d spoken so to Carlotta, accusing her outright, as they stood together amongst the graves?

“It was the music, wasn’t it?” Evelyn had said, trembling as she made her verbal assault, fired with hatred and grief. “You had to have the music. When the band was playing loud and wild, Lionel could come up on Stella and shoot her with the gun. And ‘the man’ didn’t even know, did he? You used the music to distract ‘the man.’ You knew the trick. Julien told me the trick. You tricked ‘the man’ with music. You killed your sister, you were the one.”

“Witch, get away from me,” Carlotta had said, seething with anger. “You and all your kind.”

“Ah, but I know, and your brother’s in the straitjacket, yes, but you’re the killer! You put him up to it. You used the music, you knew the trick.”

It had taken all her strength to say those words, but her love for Stella had demanded it. Stella. Evelyn had lain alone in the bed in the little French Quarter apartment, holding Stella’s dress in her hands, crying against it. And the pearls, they would never find Stella’s pearls. She had turned inward after Stella, she had never dared to want again.

“I’d give them to you, ducky,” Stella had said of the pearls, “you know, I really would, but Carlotta will raise hell! She’s read me the riot act, ducky, I cannot give away the heirlooms and things! If she ever knew about that Victrola-that Julien let you take it-she’d get it away from you. She’s an inventory taker that one. That’s what she ought to do in hell, make sure nobody’s gotten out to purgatory by mistake, or is not suffering his fair share of fire and brimstone. She’s a beast. You may not see me again so soon, ducky dear, I may run away with that Talamasca person from England.”

“No good can come of that!” she said. “I feel afraid.”

“Dance tonight. Have fun. Come on. You cannot wear my pearls if you won’t dance.”

And never again had they even spoken together, she and Stella. Oh, to see the blood oozing on the waxed floor.

Well, yes, Evelyn had answered Carlotta later, she did have the pearls but she’d left them there at the house that night, and after that she would never answer another question about them.

Over the decades, others asked. Even Lauren came in time and asked. “They were priceless pearls. You don’t remember what happened to them?”

And young Ryan, Gifford’s beloved, and her beloved, even he had been forced to bring up the unpleasant subject.

“Ancient Evelyn, Aunt Carlotta will not drop the question of these pearls.” At least Gifford had kept her counsel then, thank heaven, and Gifford had looked so miserable. Never should have showed the pearls to Gifford. But Gifford had said not a word.

Well, if it hadn’t been for Gifford, the priceless pearls would have stayed in the wall forever. Gifford, Gifford, Gifford, Miss Goody-two-shoes, Miss Meddler! But then they were in the wall again, weren’t they? That was the lovely part. They were in the wall right now.

All the more reason to walk straight, to walk slow, to walk sure. The pearls too are up there, and surely they must be given to Mona, for Rowan Mayfair was gone and might never return.

My, so many houses on this long avenue had vanished. It was too sad, really. Whatever made up for a magnificent house, full of ornament and gay shutters and rounded windows? Not these, these mock buildings of stucco and glue, these dreary little tenements all got up for the middle class as if people were fools after all.

You had to hand it to Mona, she knew. She said quite flatly that modern architecture had been a failure. You had only to look around to see, and that was why people loved the old houses now. “You know, I figure, Ancient Evelyn, that probably more houses were built and torn down between 1860 and 1960 than ever before in human history. Think about the cities of Europe. The houses of Amsterdam go back to the 1600s. And then think about New York. Almost every structure on Fifth Avenue is new; there is hardly a house left standing on the whole street from the turn of the century. I believe there is the Frick mansion, and I can’t think of another one. Of course I’ve never been to New York, except with Gifford, and it wasn’t Gifford’s thing to go examining old buildings. I think she thought we went there to go shopping, and shop we did.”

Evelyn had agreed, though she hadn’t said so. On all accounts, Evelyn always agreed with Mona. Though Aunt Evelyn never said.

But that was the great thing about Mona; before her computer had drawn off all her love, Mona had used Ancient Evelyn as her sounding board, and it had never been necessary to say anything to Mona. Mona could make a long conversation all on her own, proceeding with manic fire from one topic to another. Mona was her treasure, and now that Gifford was gone, why, she would talk to Mona and they could sit alone, and they could play the Victrola. And the pearls. Yes, she would wrap them around Mona’s neck.

Again came that wicked and terrible relief. No more Gifford of the haggard face, and frightened eyes, speaking of conscience and right in a hushed voice, no more Gifford to witness Alicia’s decay and death with horror in her face, no more Gifford standing watch over all of them.

Was the Avenue still the Avenue? Surely she would come to the corner of Washington soon, but there were so many of these new buildings that she had lost her bearings.

Life had become so noisy. Life had become crude. Garbage trucks roared as they devoured the trash. Trucks clattered in the street. The banana man was gone, the ice cream man was gone. The chimney sweeps came no more. The old woman no longer came with the blackberries. Laura Lee died in pain. Deirdre went mad, and then Deirdre’s daughter, Rowan, came home, only one day too late to see her mother alive, and a horror happened on Christmas Day and no one wanted to speak of it. And Rowan Mayfair was gone.

What if Rowan Mayfair and her new man had found the Victrola and the records? But no, Gifford said they had not. Gifford kept watch. Gifford would have snatched them away again, if she had to do it.

And Gifford’s hiding place had been Stella’s own, known only to Gifford because Evelyn had revealed it to her. Stupid thing to have done, to have ever wasted a tale or a song or a verse upon Gifford or Alicia. They were mere links in a chain and the jewel was Mona.

“They won’t find them, Ancient Evelyn, I put the pearls back in the very same secret place in the library. The Victrola with them. The whole kit and caboodle will be safe there forever.”

And Gifford, the country club Mayfair, had gone up to that dark house and hidden those things away on her own. Had she seen the man on that dark journey?

“They’ll never be found. They’ll rot with that house,” Gifford had said. “You know. You showed me the place yourself the day we were in the library.”

“You mock me, you evil child.” But she had shown little Gifford the secret niche on the very afternoon of Laura Lee’s funeral. That must have been the last time Carlotta opened the house.

It was 1960, and Deirdre was already very sick, and having lost her baby, Rowan, Deidre had gone back for a long time in the hospital. Cortland had been dead a year.

But Carlotta had always pitied Laura Lee, always pitied her that she had Evelyn for a mother. And then there were Millie Dear and Belle, both saying, Carlotta, can’t we bring them all back here? And Carlotta looking sadly at Evelyn, trying to hate her, yet feeling so sorry for her that she had buried her daughter. And perhaps that she, Evelyn, had been buried alive, herself, since the day of Stella’s death.

“You can bring the family here,” Millie Dear had said, and Carlotta had not dared to contradict her. “Yes, indeed,” said Belle, for Belle had always known that Laura Lee was Julien’s child. Everyone had known. “Yes, indeed,” said Belle, sweet Belle. “Come back to the house with us, all of you.”

Why she had gone? She did not really know! Maybe to see Julien’s house again. Maybe she had intended all along to slip into the library and see if the pearls were still there, if anyone had ever found them.

And as the others gathered, as they whispered of Laura Lee’s suffering and poor little Gifford and poor little Alicia, and all the sad things that had befallen them all, Evelyn had taken Gifford by the hand and led her into the library.

“Stop your crying for your mother,” Evelyn had said. “Laura Lee’s gone to heaven. Now come here, and I’ll show you a secret place. I’ll show you something beautiful. I have a necklace for you.”

Gifford had wiped her eyes. She had been in a daze since her mother’s death, and that daze wouldn’t break until she married Ryan many years later on. But with Gifford there had always been hope. On the afternoon of Laura Lee’s funeral, there had been plenty of hope.

Indeed, Gifford had had a good life, one had to admit, fretting it away as she did, but still she had her love of Ryan, she had her beautiful children, she had heart enough to love Mona and leave her alone, though Mona frightened the life out of her.

Life. Gifford dead. Not possible. Should have been Alicia. All a mix-up. Horse stopped at the wrong gate. Did Julien foresee this?

It was like just a moment ago-Laura Lee’s funeral. Think again about the library-dusty, neglected. Women talking in the other room.

Evelyn had taken little Gifford to the bookcase, and pushed the books aside. She’d drawn out the long string of pearls. “We’re taking this home now. I hid it thirty years ago, the day that Stella died here in the parlor. Carlotta never found it. And these, these are pictures of Stella and me too. I’m taking them too. Someday I will give these things to you and your sister.”

Gifford, leaning back on her heels, had looked at the long necklace in amazement.

It made Evelyn feel so good to have beaten Carlotta, to have kept the pearls when all else seemed lost. The necklace and the music box, her treasures.

“What do you mean, the love of another woman?” Gifford had asked her many nights after that, when they sat on the porch talking over the cheerful noise of the Avenue traffic.

“I mean the love of a woman, that’s what I mean, that I kissed her mouth, that I sucked her breasts, that I went down and put my tongue between her legs and tasted her taste, that I loved her, that I drowned in her!”

Gifford had been shocked and afraid. Had she married with her hair down? Very very likely. A horrid thing, a virgin girl. Though if anyone could make the best of such a thing, it had probably been Gifford.

Ah, this was Washington Avenue. It was. No doubt of it. And behold, the florist shop was still here, and that meant that Ancient Evelyn could go carefully up these few little steps and order the flowers herself for her precious girl.

“What did you do with my treasures?”

“Don’t tell those things to Mona!”

Ancient Evelyn stared in bafflement at the florist blossoms crowding against the glass, like flowers in prison, wondering where to send the flowers for Gifford. Gifford was the one who had died.

Oh, my darling…

She knew what flowers she wanted to send. She knew what flowers Gifford liked.

They wouldn’t bring her home for the wake. Of course not. Not the Metairie Mayfairs. They would never never do such a thing. Why, her body was probably already being painted in some refrigerated funeral home.

“Don’t try to put me on ice in such a place,” Evelyn had said after Deirdre’s funeral last year, when Mona stood describing the whole thing, how Rowan Mayfair had come from California to lean over the coffin and kiss her dead mother. How Carlotta had keeled over dead that very night into Deirdre’s rocker, like she wanted to be dead with Deirdre, leaving that poor Rowan Mayfair from California all alone in that spooky house.

“Oh, life, oh, time!” Mona had said, stretching out her thin pale arms, and swinging her long red hair to the left and the right. “It was worse than the death of Ophelia.”

“Probably not,” Ancient Evelyn had said. For Deirdre had lost her mind years before, and if this California doctor, Rowan Mayfair, had had any gumption at all, she would have come home long before now, demanding answers of those who drugged and hurt her mother. No good could come of that California girl, Ancient Evelyn knew, and that was why they’d never brought her up to Amelia Street, and Ancient Evelyn had therefore seen her only once, at the woman’s wedding, when she wasn’t a woman at all, but a sacrificial creature for the family, decked out in white with the emerald burning on her neck.

She’d gone to that wedding not because Rowan Mayfair, the designee of the legacy, was marrying a young man named Michael Curry in St. Mary’s church, but because Mona would be the flower girl, and it had made Mona happy for Ancient Evelyn to come, to sit in the pew and see, and nod as Mona passed.

So hard it had been to enter the house after all those years, and see it beautiful once more the way it had been in those times when she had been with Julien. To see the happiness of Dr. Rowan Mayfair and her innocent husband, Michael Curry. Like one of Mary Bern’s Irish boys, he was big and muscular, and very frank and kind in his brusque and ignorant way, though he was educated they said, and affected the common air, so to speak, because he’d come from the back streets, and his father had been a fireman.

Oh, so like the boys of Mary Beth, Ancient Evelyn had thought, but that was all she remembered of that wedding, all she remembered of Deirdre’s daughter. They’d taken Ancient Evelyn home early when Alicia had been too drunk to stay. She hadn’t minded. She’d sat by Alicia’s bed as always, saying her beads, and dreaming, and humming the songs that Julien used to play in the upstairs room.

And the bride and groom of last year had danced in that double parlor. And the Victrola was hidden in the library wall, and no one would ever find it. She herself did not think of it, or maybe she would have gone to it, as all the others sang and drank and laughed together. Maybe under that roof, she would have wound it again and said “Julien,” and to the wedding he would have come, an unexpected guest!

Hadn’t even thought of it then. Too afraid Alicia would stumble.

That night, late, Gifford had come upstairs to Alicia’s room at Amelia Street. She’d put her hand on Ancient Evelyn’s shoulder. “I’m glad you came to the wedding,” she’d said so kindly. “I wish you would come out again, more often.” And then she had asked. “You didn’t go to the secret place. You didn’t tell them?”

Ancient Evelyn had not bothered to answer.

“Rowan and Michael will be happy!” Gifford had kissed her cheek and gone off. The room stank of drink. Alicia moaned as her mother had moaned, determined to die at all costs, be with Mother.

Washington Avenue. Yes, indeed this was it. Over there, the white-shingled Queen Anne house same as always. It was the only one left on any of the four corners, of course, but it was the same, very same.

And here the florist. Yes, she had been about to buy the flowers, hadn’t she? For her darling girl, her darling…

And look, the strangest thing was happening. A little bespectacled young man had appeared in the doorway of the florist, and he was speaking to her, was he not? Time to listen over the rumble of the traffic.

“Ancient Evelyn. That’s you. I hardly recognized you. What are you doing so far from home, Ancient Evelyn, come inside. Let me call your granddaughter.”

“My granddaughter’s dead,” she said. “You can’t call her.”

“Yes, ma’am, I’m sorry, I know.” He came to the edge of the little porch. He wasn’t so young, really, she could see that now, and she did know this young man, didn’t she?

“I’m so sorry about Miss Gifford, ma’am. I’ve been taking orders for flowers all morning long. I meant I’d like to call Miss Alicia to come and get you and take you home.”

“You think Alicia could come to pick me up, shows what you know, poor boy.” But why speak? Why speak at all? She had given up this sort of feisty foolishness long ago. She would wear herself crazy today going back to this sort of chatter.

But what was this man’s name? What on earth was he saying now? Oh, she’d remember if she tried, who he was, and where she’d seen him last, or most, and that he’d come with a delivery or two, or that he’d waved to her in the evening as he walked along, but was it worth it to remember such things? Like following the string back through the labyrinth. Oh bother! Oh stupid bother!

The young man came down the steps.

“Ancient Evelyn, won’t you let me help you inside? How pretty you look today, with that lovely pin on your dress.”

I’m sure I do, she thought dreamily. Hiding in the body of this old woman. But why say such things to hurt the feelings of an innocent man, an unimportant man, even if he was hairless and anemic? He didn’t know how long she’d been an old woman! Why it had started not long after Laura Lee was born, in a way, her walking the wicker baby carriage all the way up here and round and back around the cemetery. Might as well have been old.

“How did you know my granddaughter died! Who told you?” It was astonishing. She wasn’t certain now how she herself knew.

“Mr. Fielding called. He said to fill that room with flowers. He was crying when he called. It’s oh, so sad. I’m sorry, Ancient Evelyn, truly I am. I don’t know what to say at such times.”

“Well, you ought to, you sell people flowers. Flowers for the dead more often probably than flowers for the living. You ought to learn and memorize some nice things to say. People expect you to talk, don’t they?”

“What was that, ma’am?”

“Listen, young man, whoever you are. You send flowers for me for my grandchild Gifford.”

He’d heard that right enough but it was a dollars and cents order.

“You make it a standing spray of white gladiolus and red roses and lilies, and you put a ribbon on it. You write Grandchild on the ribbon, do you hear? That’s all. Make sure it’s big and beautiful and they put it beside her coffin. And where is that coffin to be, by the way, did my cousin Fielding have the decency to say, or are you supposed to call funeral parlors on your own until you discover it?”

“Metairie, ma’am. I already know. Others are calling.”

What was in Metairie? What? What was he saying? A huge truck had bounced and rattled across the intersection and down towards Carondolet. Nuisance. And look at those town houses over there! Good Lord, so they had torn down that beautiful house too, idiots. I am surrounded by idiots.

She pushed at her hair. The young man was pulling at her arm. “Get away from me,” she said, or tried to say. What had she been discussing with this young man? Indeed, she did not know. And what was she doing here of all places? Had he just asked her that very question?

“Let me put you in a cab for home, or I’ll take you there myself.”

“You will not,” she said, and as she looked at the flowers behind the glass she remembered. She walked on, past him, turning off the Avenue and going into the Garden District and towards the cemetery. Always been one of her favorite walks this way to see the Mayfair tomb when she passed the gates, and lo and behold, Commander’s Palace was still there. She could see the awnings all the way from here. How many a year had it been since she dined inside! Of course Gifford was always begging to take her.

Lunch with Gifford at Commander’s, and Ryan such a proper shiny-faced boy. Hard to believe a child like that was a Mayfair, a great-grandson of Julien. But more and more the Mayfairs had taken on that shiny look. Gifford always ordered the Shrimp Remoulade, and never spilt a drop of the sauce on her scarf or her blouse.

Gifford. Nothing really could have happened to Gifford.

“Young man,” she said.

He walked beside her holding her arm, perplexed, superior, confused, proud.

“What happened to my grandchild? Tell me. What did Fielding Mayfair tell you? I am so distraught. Don’t think me a forgetful old woman, and let go of my arm. I don’t need you. What happened to Gifford Mayfair, I’m asking you now.”

“I don’t know for sure, ma’am,” he said. “They found her in the sand. She’d lost a lot of blood, some kind of hemorrhage they said. But I don’t know any more than that. She was dead by the time they got her to the hospital. That’s all I know, and her husband is on his way there now to find out everything.”

“Well, of course he is on his way,” she said. She jerked her arm free. “I thought I told you to let me go.”

“I’m afraid you’ll fall, Ancient Evelyn. I’ve never seen you so far from home.”

“What are we talking about, son? Eight blocks? I used to make this walk all the time. Used to be a little drugstore there on the corner of Prytania and Washington. Used to stop for ice cream. Feed Laura Lee ice cream. Please, do, let go of my arm!”

He looked so crushed, so hurt, so frozen and sorry. Poor thing. But when you were old and weak, your authority was all you had left, and it could crumble in an instant. If she fell now, if her leg went out from under her-But no, she would not let that happen!

“Well, bless your soul, you are a sweet boy. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, but please don’t talk to me as if I were addle-brained, for I am not. Walk me across Prytania Street. It’s too wide. Then you go back and fix the flowers for my darling girl, won’t you, and how do you know who I am, may I ask?”

“I bring your flowers on your birthday, ma’am, lots and lots of flowers every year. You know my name. My name is Hanky. Don’t you remember me? I wave when I pass the gate.”

It wasn’t said with reproach, but he was highly suspicious now and very likely to take action, to force her into a cab, or worse, to go call someone to head her off, for it was perfectly obvious that she ought not to be able to make this trek alone.

“Ah, yes, Hanky, I do remember you of course, and your father was Harry who went in the Vietnam War. And then there was your mother, who moved back to Virginia.”

“Yes, ma’am, you’ve got it all right. You’ve got it perfect.” How delighted he was. That was the most maddening and annoying aspect of old age. If you could add two and two people clapped for you! They clapped. It was true. It was pathetic. Of course she remembered Harry. He’d delivered flowers to them for years and years. Or was that old Harry? Oh, Lord, Julien, why have I lived this long? For what? What am I doing?

There was the white wall of the cemetery.

“Come on, young Hanky, be a nice boy and cross me over. I have to go,” she said.

“Ancient Evelyn, please let me drive you home. Let me call your grandson-in-law.”

“That sot, you twit!” She turned on him full face. “I’m going to hit you with this walking stick.” She laughed in spite of herself at the idea of it, and he laughed too.

“But ma’am, aren’t you tired? Don’t you want to rest? Come back into the florist shop and rest.”

She felt too weary suddenly to say another word. Why speak? They never listened.

She planted her feet on the corner and held tight to her cane with both hands and stared down the leafy corridor of Washington Avenue. The best oaks in the city, she often thought, all the way to the river. Should she give up? Something was terribly wrong, terribly terribly wrong, and her mission, what had it been? Good God, she could not recollect.

An old white-haired gentleman stood opposite, was he as old as she? And he smiled at her. He smiled and he waved for her to come on. What a dandy he was! And at his age. It made her laugh to see such colorful clothes, the yellow silk waistcoat! By God, that was Julien. Julien Mayfair! It gave her such a great and pleasurable shock, she felt it all over her face, as if someone had touched her with a cool cloth and wakened her. Look at him. Julien! Waving to her to come on, hurry it up.

And then he was gone, simply gone, yellow waistcoat and all, the way he always did it, the stubborn dead, the crazy dead, the puzzling dead! But she had remembered everything. Mona was up at that house. Gifford had suffered a fatal loss of blood, and Ancient Evelyn had to go to First Street. Julien knew she must go on. That was good enough for her.

“You let him touch you!” Gifford had asked her, in amazement, CeeCee laughing in that snide, silly way.

“My dears, I adored it.”

If only she could have said such a thing to Tobias and to Walker. Nights before Laura Lee’s birth she’d unlocked the attic door and she had walked on her own to the hospital. The old men had not been told until the child was safe in her arms.

“Don’t you see what that bastard has done?” Walker had cried. “It’s to plant the witches’ seeds! This is a witch too!”

How frail was Laura Lee. Was that a witch’s seed? If it was, then only the cats had known it. Think of the way they had crowded about Laura Lee, arching their backs and rubbing themselves on her thin little legs. Laura Lee with the witch’s finger which she had not passed on to Alicia or Gifford, thank God!

The light turned green.

Ancient Evelyn began to walk across the street. The young man talked and talked, but she paid him no mind. She walked on, beside the whitewashed walls, next to the quiet and invisible dead, the properly buried dead, and by the time she reached the gates in the middle of the block, young Hanky-of-the-flowers was nowhere about, and she was not going to look back to see what he had done or where he’d gone or if he was rushing back to his flower shop to call the patrol for her. She stopped at the gates. She could just see the edge of the Mayfair tomb down there in the middle of the block, jutting out ever so slightly into the path. She knew everyone inside, she could knock on every rectangle of stone. “Hello in there, my darlings.”

Gifford wouldn’t be buried there, oh, no. Gifford would be buried out in Metairie. Country club Mayfairs, she thought. They had always called them that, even in Cortland’s time, or was it Cortland who started that expression to describe his own children? Cortland who had whispered in her ear once, “Daughter, I love you,” so quick the country club Mayfairs couldn’t hear.

Gifford, my darling Gifford.

She imagined Gifford in her lovely red wool suit, and white blouse with a soft silk bow at the neck. Gifford wore gloves, but only to drive. She had been putting them on, very carefully, caramel leather gloves. She looked younger than Alicia now, though she was not. She cared for herself, groomed herself, loved other people.

“I can’t stay for Mardi Gras this year,” she’d said. “I just can’t.” She’d come to tell them she was driving to Destin.

“Well, I hope you don’t expect me to receive everybody here!” Alicia had cried. Utter panic. She’d dropped the magazine on the porch. “I can’t do all that. I can’t get the ham and the bread. I can’t. I won’t. I’ll lock up the house. I’m not well. And Aunt Evelyn just sits there and sits there. Where is Patrick? You should stay here and help me. Why don’t you do something about Patrick? Do you know Patrick drinks in the morning now? He drinks all morning. Where is Mona? Goddamnit, Mona went out without telling me. Mona is always going out without telling me. Somebody should put a leash on Mona. I need Mona! Board up the damned windows, will you, before you leave?”

Gifford had remained so calm.

“They’re all going to First Street this year, CeeCee,” Gifford had said. “You don’t have to do anything except what you always do, no matter how you plan to do otherwise.”

“Oh, you are so mean to me. Did you come uptown just to say this to me? And what about Michael Curry? They say he almost died on Christmas Day, may I ask why he is giving a party on Shrove Tuesday?” Alicia was by that time trembling with indignation and rage at the sheer madness of life, at the utter lack of logic to things, that anything could expect anything of her. After all, had she not practically killed herself just to secure that, from all responsibility she would be forever exempt? How much more liquor did it take?

“This Michael Curry nearly drowns and so what does he do? He gives a party? Doesn’t he know his wife is missing! His wife could be dead! What kind of man is he, this crazy Michael Curry! And who the hell said he could live in that house! What are they going to do about the legacy! What if Rowan Mayfair never comes back! Go on, go to Destin. Why should you care? Leave me here. It doesn’t matter! Go to hell.”

Wasted anger, wasted words, beside the point, always beside the point. Had Alicia said anything straightforward or honest in twenty years? Most likely not.

“They want to gather at First Street, CeeCee, it’s not my idea. I’m going away.” Gifford’s voice had been so soft that Alicia probably had not even heard, and those had been the last words her sister would ever speak to her. Oh, my darling, my darling dear, bend to kiss me again, kiss my cheek, now, hold my hand, even with your soft leather glove, I loved you my sweetheart, my grandbaby, no matter what I said. I did, I loved you.

Gifford.

Gifford’s car had driven away, as Alicia stood on the porch and swore. Barefoot and cold. She’d kicked the magazine. “So she just leaves. She just leaves. I can’t believe it. She just leaves. What am I supposed to do?”

Ancient Evelyn had spoken not a word. Words spoken to drunkards were truly words written in water. They vanished into the endless void in which the drunkard languished. Could a ghost be any worse off?

Gifford had tried and tried. Gifford was Mayfair through and through. Gifford had loved; fretted, yes, but loved.

Little girl with a conscience, on the floor of the library, “But should we just take these pearls?”

All doomed, that generation, the Mayfair children of the time of science and psychology. Better to have lived in the time of crinolines and carriages and voodooiennes. We are past our time. Julien knew.

But Mona wasn’t doomed, was she? Now that was a witch for this day and time. Mona at her computer, chewing gum and typing faster than any person in the universe. “If there was an Olympic race for typing, I’d win it.” And on the screen, all those charts and graphs. “See this? This is a Mayfair family tree. Know what I figured out?”

Art and magic will triumph in the end, Julien had said. I know it. Was the computer art and magic? Even the way the screen glowed in the dark, and that little voice box inside that Mona had programmed to say in an eerie flat way:

“Good morning, Mona. This is your computer talking to you. Don’t forget to brush your teeth.” It was perfectly frightening to see Mona’s room come alive at eight o’clock, what with the computer talking like that as the coffeepot gurgled and hissed, and the microwave oven went on to heat the rolls with a tiny beep, and CNN Headline News came alive and talking on the TV. “I like to wake up connected,” said Mona. The paperboy had learned to throw the Wall Street Journal up to the second floor porch outside her window.

Mona, to find Mona.

To find Mona, she was going to Chestnut Street. She had come so far.

Time to cross big Washington Avenue. She should have crossed it at the light back there, but then she might not have seen Julien. Everything works out. The morning was still and empty, and quiet. And the oaks made a church of the street. And there stood the old firehouse so deserted. Had the firemen gone away? But that was way off her course. She had to go down Chestnut Street now, and here would come the slippery sidewalks, the bricks and the stones, and it was best perhaps that she walked in the street itself, just along the parked cars, as she’d done years ago, rather than slip and fall. The cars came slow through these streets.

Soft and leafy as Paradise, the Garden District.

The traffic waited until she reached the curb, and then with a loud swoosh it moved on behind her. Yes, take to the street. And even here was the litter of Mardi Gras. What a shame, for shame.

Why doesn’t everyone come out and sweep the banquette? She felt sad suddenly that she had not done this herself this morning as was her plan. She had meant to go out. She liked to sweep. It took her forever. And Alicia would call down to her, “Come inside!” but she swept and swept.

“Miss Ancient Evelyn, you’ve been sweeping out here for hours,” Patricia would say.

But of course, why not? Will the leaves ever stop falling? Why, whenever she thought of Mardi Gras coming, all that entered her mind was that it was going to be fun to sweep the banquette after. So much rubble and trash. Sweep and sweep.

Only something this morning had come between her and the broom. What was it?

The Garden District was dead quiet. It really was as if no one had lived here. The noise of the Avenue was so much better. On the Avenue, you were never alone; even late at night the headlamps shone through the windows, and threw a cheery yellow glow into the mirrors. You could go outside in the very cool of the darkest morning, and stand on the corner and see the streetcar drift by, or a man strolling past, or a car creeping along with young men inside laughing and talking to each other, furtive yet happy.

On and on she walked. But they had destroyed the old houses here too, some of them. It was probably true, Mona’s observation, whatever it had been, something to do with architecture. A stunning lack of vision. A clash between science and imagination. “A misunderstanding,” Mona had said, “of the relationship of form and function.” Some forms succeed and some fail. Everything is form. Mona had said that. Mona would have loved Julien.

She came to Third Street now. Halfway there. It was nothing to cross these little streets. There was no traffic at all. No one was awake yet. On she walked, sure of herself on the asphalt that gleamed in the sun, with no evil cracks or crevices to trip her.

Julien, why don’t you come back? Why don’t you help me? Why are you always such a tease? Good God, Julien. I can play the Victrola now in the library. There is no one to stop me, just Michael Curry, that sweet man, and Mona. I can play the Victrola and say your name.

Ah, what a lovely perfume, the ligustrum in bloom. She had forgotten all about it. And there was the house, my Lord, look at the color of it. She had never known it to have much of a color at all, and now it was all bright and grayish violet, with shutters painted in green, and the fence very black against it.

Oh, it was restored! What a good thing Michael Curry had done.

And there, there on the upstairs porch he stood looking down at her. Michael Curry. Yes, that was the man.

He was in his pajamas and very rumpled, robe open in front and he was smoking a cigarette. Like Spencer Tracy he looked, that chunky and Irish and rough, though his hair was black. Nice good-looking man with lots of black hair. And weren’t his eyes blue? Certainly seemed so.

“Hello there, Michael Curry,” she said. “I’ve come to see you. I’ve come to talk to Mona Mayfair.”

Good Lord, what a shock that gave him. How alarmed he was. But she sang it out loud and clear.

“I know Mona’s inside. You tell her to come out.”

And then there was her sleepy girl, in a white gown, all frazzled and yawning the way children do, as if no one is holding them accountable.

Up in the treetops they stood behind the black railing, and it struck her suddenly what had happened, where they had been together. Oh, good Lord, and Gifford had warned her about this, that Mona was “on the path” so to speak, and must be watched, and that child hadn’t been looking for the “Victrola at all, she’d been looking for Mary Beth’s style of Irish boy, Rowan Mayfair’s husband: Michael Curry.

Ancient Evelyn felt a lovely desire to laugh and laugh.

As Stella would have said, “What a scream!”

But Ancient Evelyn was tired and her fingers curled over the black wire of the fence and she was relieved as she bowed her head to hear the big front door open, to hear naked feet slap across the porch, that intimate unmistakable patter, and to see Mona standing there, until she realized what she had to tell Mona.

“What is it, Ancient Evelyn?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

“You didn’t see anything, child? She didn’t call your name? Think, my precious girl, before I tell you. No, it’s not your mother.”

And then Mona’s little-girl face crumpled and became wet with tears, and, opening the gate, she wiped at her eye with the back of her hand.

“Aunt Gifford,” she cried in a wee voice, so fragile and young and so unlike Mona the Strong, and Mona the Genius. “Aunt Gifford! And I had been so glad that she wasn’t here.”

“You didn’t do it, darling child,” she said. “Blood in the sand. Happened this morning. Maybe she didn’t suffer. Maybe she’s in heaven this very minute looking down on us and wondering why we are sad.”

Michael Curry stood at the top of the marble steps, robe properly closed, with slippers on his feet, hands in his pockets, hair even combed.

“Why, that young man isn’t sick,” she said.

Mona broke into sobs, staring helplessly from Ancient Evelyn to the ruddy dark-haired man on the porch.

“Who said he was dying of a bad heart?” asked Ancient Evelyn as she watched him come down the steps. She reached out and clasped the young man’s hand. “There’s nothing wrong with this strapping young man at all!”