The witching hour

Seven

HE’D MADE THE cab driver stop on the way in for a six-pack, already jubilant to be in the warm summer air, and now as they made the turn off the freeway and came down into the familiar and unforgettable squalor of lower St. Charles Avenue, Michael felt like weeping at the sight of the black-barked oak trees with their dark foliage, and the long narrow St. Charles streetcar, exactly as he had remembered it, roaring and clattering along its track.

Even on this stretch, in the midst of the ugly hamburger joints and the seedy wooden barrooms and the new apartment buildings towering over boarded-up shopfronts and deserted gas stations, it was his old, verdant, and softly beautiful town. He loved even the weeds exploding in the cracks. The grass grew rich and green on the neutral ground. The crepe myrtle trees were covered with frothy blooms. He saw pink crepe myrtle and purple crepe myrtle, and a red as rich as the red of watermelon meat.

“Look at that, will you!” he said to the driver, who had been talking on and on about the crime, and the bad times here. “The sky’s violet, it’s violet just like I remembered it, and goddamnit, all these years out there I thought I imagined all this, I thought I colored it in with a crayon in my memory, you know.”

He felt like crying. All the time he’d held Rowan while she’d cried, he’d never shed a tear. But now he felt like bawling, and oh, how he wished Rowan were here.

The driver was laughing at him. “Yeah, well, that’s a purple sky all right, I guess you could call it that.”

“Damn right it is,” said Michael. “You were born between Magazine and the river, weren’t you?” Michael said. “I’d have known that voice anywhere.”

“What you talking about, boy, what about your own voice,” the driver teased him back. “I was born on Washington and St. Thomas for your information, youngest of nine children. They don’t make families like that anymore.” The cab was just crawling down the avenue, the soft moist August breeze washing through the open windows. The street lamps had just gone on.

Michael closed his eyes. Even the cab driver’s endless diatribe was music. But for this, this fragrant and embraceable warmth, he had longed with his whole soul. Was there anyplace else in the world where the air was such a living presence, where the breeze kissed you and stroked you, where the sky was pulsing and alive? And oh God, what it meant to be no longer cold!

“Oh, I am telling you, nobody’s got a right to be as happy as I am now,” Michael said. “Nobody. Look at the trees,” he said opening his eyes, staring up at the black curling branches.

“Where the hell you been, son?” asked the driver. He was a short man in a bill cap, with his elbow half out the window.

“Oh, I’ve been in hell, buddy, and let me tell you something about hell. It’s not hot. It’s cold. Hey, look, there’s the Pontchartrain Hotel and it’s still the same, damn, it’s still the same.” In fact, it looked if anything more elegant and aloof than it had in the old days. It had trim blue awnings, and the old complement of doormen and bellmen standing at the glass doors.

Michael could hardly sit still. He wanted to get out, to walk, to cover the old pavements. But he’d told the driver to take him up to First Street, that they’d double back to the hotel later, and for First Street he could wait.

He finished the second beer just as they came to the light at Jackson Avenue, and at that point everything changed. Michael hadn’t remembered the transition as so dramatic; but the oaks grew taller and infinitely denser; the apartment buildings gave way to the white houses with the Corinthian columns; and the whole drowsy twilight world seemed suddenly veiled in soft, glowing green.

“Rowan, if only you were here,” he whispered. There was the James Gallier house on the corner of St. Charles and Philip, splendidly restored. And across the street the Henry Howard house, spiffed up with a new coat of paint. Iron fences guarded lawns and gardens. “Christ, I’m home!” he whispered.

When he first landed he had regretted getting so drunk-it was just too damned hard to handle his suitcase and find a taxi-but now he was past that. As the cab turned left on First Street and entered the dark leafy core of the Garden District, he was in ecstasy.

“You realize it’s just the way it used to be!” he told the driver. An immense gratitude flooded him. He passed the fresh beer to him, but the driver only laughed and waved it away.

“Later, son,” he said. “Now where are we going?” In the slow motion of dream time, it seemed, they glided past the massive mansions. Michael saw brick sidewalks, the tall stiff magnolia grandiflora with their shiny dark leaves.

“Just drive, real slow, let this guy here pass us, yeah, very slow, until I tell you to stop.”

He had chosen the most beautiful hour of the evening for his return, he thought. He wasn’t thinking now of the visions or the dark mandate. He was so brimful of happiness all he could think about was what lay before him, and about Rowan. That was the test of love, he thought dreamily, when you can’t bear to be this happy without the other person with you. He was really afraid that the tears were going to come pouring down his face.

The cab driver started talking again. He had never really stopped talking. Now he was talking about the Redemptorist Parish and how it had been in the old days, and how it was all run-down now. Yeah, Michael wanted to see the old church. “I was an altar boy at St. Alphonsus,” Michael said.

But that didn’t matter, that could wait forever. Because, looking up, Michael saw the house.

He saw its long dark flank stretching back from the corner; he saw the unmistakable iron railings with their rose pattern; he saw the sentinel oaks stretching out their mammoth branches like mighty and protective arms.

“That’s it,” he said, his voice dropping senselessly and breathlessly to a whisper. “Pull over to the right. Stop here.” Taking the beer with him, he stepped out of the cab and walked to the corner, so that he could stand diagonally opposite the house.

It was as if a hush had fallen over the world. For the first time he heard the cicadas singing, the deep churning song rising all around him, which made the shadows themselves seem alive. And there came another sound he had forgotten completely, the shrill cry of birds.

Sounds like the woodland, he thought, as he gazed at the darkened and forlorn galleries, shrouded now in early darkness, not a single light flickering from behind the high narrow and numerous wooden blinds.

The sky was glazed and shining over the rooftop, soft and shot with violet and gold. It revealed starkly and beautifully the farthest end column of the high second gallery and, beneath the bracketed cornice, the bougainvillea vine tumbling down luxuriantly from the roof. Even in the gloom he could see the purple blossoms. And he could trace the old rose pattern in the iron railings. He could make out the capitals of the columns, the curious Italianate mixture of Doric for the side columns, Ionic for the lower ones set in ante, and Corinthian for those above.

He drew in his breath in a long mournful sigh. Again, he felt inexpressible happiness but it was mixed with sorrow, and he was not sure why. All the long years, he thought wearily, even in the midst of this joy. Memory had deceived in only one aspect, he reflected. The house was larger, far larger than he had remembered. All of these old places were larger; the very scale of everything here seemed for the moment almost unimaginable.

Yet there was a breathing, pulsing closeness to everything-the soft overgrown foliage behind the rusted iron fence blending in the darkness, and the singing of the cicadas, and the dense shadows beneath the oaks.

“Paradise,” he whispered. He gazed up at the tiny green ferns that covered the oak branches, and the tears came to his eyes. The memory of the visions was perilously close to him. It brushed him like dark wings. Yes, the house, Michael.

He stood riveted, the beer cold against the palm of his gloved hand. Was she talking to him, the woman with the dark hair?

He only knew for certain that the twilight was singing; the heat was singing; he let his gaze drift to the other mansions around him, noting nothing perhaps but the flowing harmony of fence and column and brickwork and even tiny faltering crepe myrtles struggling for life on strips of velvet green. A warm peace flooded him, and for a second the memory of the visions and their awful mandate lost its hold. Back, back into childhood he reached, not for a memory, but for a continuity. The moment expanded, moving beyond all thought, all helpless and inadequate words.

The sky darkened. It was still the brave color of amethyst, as if fighting the night with a low and relentless fire. But the light was nevertheless going. And turning his head ever so slightly to look down the long street in the direction of the river, Michael saw that there the sky was pure gold.

Deep, deep in him were memories, naturally, memories of a boy walking out this street from the crowded little houses near the river, of a boy standing in this very place when evening fell. But the present continued to eclipse everything, and there was no straining to recollect, to impress or to improve the soft inundation of his senses by everything around him, this moment of pure quiet in his soul.

Only now as he looked lovingly and slowly again at the house itself, at its deep doorway, shaped like a giant keyhole, did the impression of the visions grow strong again. Doorway. Yes, they had told him about the doorway! But it was not a literal doorway. Yet the sight of the giant keyhole and the shadowy vestibule behind it … No, couldn’t have been a literal doorway. He opened his eyes and closed them. He found himself gazing trancelike up at the windows of a northern room on the second story, and to his sudden worry, he saw the lurid glare of fire.

No, that could not happen. But within the same instant, he realized it was only the light of candles. The flicker remained constant, and he merely wondered at it, wondered that those within would choose this form of light.

The garden was thickening and closing up in the darkness. He would have to rouse himself if he wanted to walk down along the fence and look back into the side yard. He wanted to do it, but the high northern window held him. He saw now the shadow of a woman moving against the lace curtain. And through the lace, he was able to make out a dingy flower pattern on the high corner of the wall.

Suddenly he looked down at his feet. The beer had fallen from his hand. It was foaming into the gutter. Drunk, he thought, too drunk, you idiot, Michael. But it didn’t matter. On the contrary, he felt rather powerful, and suddenly he blundered across the intersection, aware of his heavy and uneven steps, and came to the front gate of the house.

He pushed his fingers through the iron webbing, staring at the dust and debris tossed about on the peeling boards of the front porch. The camellias had grown into trees which towered over the railings. And the flagstone path was covered over with leaves. He stuck his foot into the iron webbing. Easy enough to jump this gate.

“Hey, buddy, hey!”

Astonished, he turned to see the cab driver next to him, and how short he was when he wasn’t inside the cab. Just a little man with a big nose, his eyes in shadow under the bill cap, like a troll of the oaks in this heightened moment. “What are you trying to do? You lost your key?”

“I don’t live here,” Michael said. “I don’t have a key.” And suddenly he laughed at the pure absurdity of it. He felt giddy. The sweet breeze coming from the river was so luscious and the dark house was right here in front of him, almost close enough for him to touch.

“Come on, let me take you back to your hotel, you said the Pontchartrain? Right? I’ll help you get upstairs to your room.”

“Not so fast,” Michael said, “just hang on a minute.” He turned and walked down the street, distracted suddenly by the broken and uneven flagstones, pure purple, too, as he’d remembered. Was there nothing that would be faded and disappointing? He wiped at his face. Tears. Then he turned and looked into the side yard.

The crepe myrtles here had grown enormously. Their pale waxy trunks were now quite thick. And the great stretch of lawn he remembered was sad with weeds now, and the old boxwood was growing wild and unkempt. Nevertheless he loved it. Loved even the old trellis in the back, leaning under its burden of tangled vines.

And that’s where the man always stood, he thought, as he made out the faraway crepe myrtle, the one that went high up the wall of the neighboring house.

“Where are you?” he whispered. The visions hung thick over him suddenly. He felt himself fall forward against the fence, and heard its iron tendons groan. A soft rustling came from the foliage on the other side, just exactly to his right. He turned; movement in the leaves. Camellia blossoms, bruised and falling on the soft earth. He knelt and reached through the fence and caught one of them, red, broken. Was the cab driver talking to him?

“It’s OK, buddy,” Michael said, looking at the broken camellia in his hand, trying the better to see it in the gloom. Was that the gleam of a black shoe right in front of him, on the other side? Again came the rustling. Why, he was staring at a man’s pant leg. Someone was standing only an inch away. He lost his balance as he looked up. And as his knees struck the flagstones, he saw a figure looming over him, peering through the fence at him, eyes catching only a spark of light. The figure appeared frozen, wide-eyed, perilously close to him, and violently alert and focused upon him. A hand reached out, no more than a streak of white in the shadows. Michael moved away on the flags, the alarm in him instinctive and unquestioned. But now as he stared at the overgrown foliage, he realized that there was no one there.

The emptiness was as terrifying suddenly as the vanished figure. “God help me,” he whispered. His heart was knocking against his ribs. And he could not get up. The cab driver tugged on his arm.

“Come on, son, before a patrol car passes here!”

He was pulled, swaying dangerously, to his feet.

“Did you see that?” he whispered. “Christ almighty, that was the same man!” He stared at the cab driver. “I tell you it was the same man.”

“I’m telling you, son, I gotta take you back to the hotel now. This is the Garden District, boy, don’t you remember? You can’t go staggering drunk around here!”

Michael lost his footing again. He was going over. Heavily he backed off the flags into the grass, and then turned, reaching out for the tree but there was no tree. Again the driver caught him. Then another pair of hands steadied him. He spun round. If it was the man again, he was going screaming crazy.

But of all people, it was that Englishman, that white-haired fellow in the tweed suit who’d been on the plane.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Michael whispered. But even through his drunkenness he caught the man’s benign face, his reserved and refined demeanor.

“I want to help you, Michael,” the man said, with the utmost gentleness. It was one of those rich and limitlessly polite English voices. “I’d be so grateful if you’d allow me to take you back to the hotel.”

“Yeah, that seems to be the appropriate course of action,” Michael said, keenly aware that he could hardly make the words come out clear. He stared back at the garden, at the high facade of the house again, now quite lost in the darkness, though the sky in bits and pieces beyond the oak branches still carried a latent gleam. It seemed that the cab driver and the Englishman were talking together. It seemed the Englishman was paying the fare.

Michael tried to reach into his pants pocket for his money clip, but his hand kept sliding right past the cloth again and again. He moved away from the two men, falling forward and then against the fence once more. Almost all the light was gone from the lawn now, from the distant encroaching shrubs. The trellis and its weight of vines was a mere hooded shape in the night.

Yet beneath the farthest crepe myrtle, quite distinctly, Michael could make out a thin human shape. He could see the pale oval of the man’s face, and to his disbelieving eye came clear the same stiff white collar of the old days, the same silk tie at the throat.

Like a man right out of a novel. And he had seen these very same details only moments before in his panic.

“Come on, Michael, let me take you back,” said the Englishman.

“First you have to tell me something,” Michael said. He was beginning to shake all over. “Look, tell me, do you see that man?”

But now he saw only the various shades of darkness. And out of memory, there came his mother’s voice, young and crisp and painfully immediate. “Michael, now you know there is no man there.”