Violin

Chapter 3

Dig deep, deep, my soul, to find the heart-the blood, the heat, the shrine and resting place. Dig deep, deep into the moist soil all the ay to where they lie, those I love-she, Mother, with her dark hair loose and gone, her bones long since tumbled in the back of the vault, other coffins came to rest in her spot, but in this dream I range them round me to hold as if she were here, Mother, in a dark red dress, with her dark hair and he-my lately dead father, wax probably still buried without a tie because he had wanted none and I took it off him right there beside the coffin and unbuttoned his shirt, knowing how much he had hated ties, and his limbs were whole and neat with undertakers' fluids or who knows, perhaps within they were alive already with all earth's tender mouths, come to mourn, devour and then depart, and she, the smallest one, my beautiful one, cancer-bald lovely as an angel born hairless and perfect, but then let me give her back her long golden hair that fell out because of the drugs, her hair that was so fine to brush and brush, strawberry blond, the prettiest little girl in all the world, flesh of my flesh-my daughter dead so many years now she'd be a woman if she had lived-Dig deep . . . let me lie with you, let us lie here, all of us together.

Lie with us, with Karl and me. Karl's a skeleton already!

Open lies this grave with all of us so tenderly and happily together. There is no word for union as gentle and total as this, our bodies, our corpses, our bones, so heavily snuggled together.

I know no separation from anyone. Not Mother, not Father, not Karl, not Lily, no t all the living and all the dead as we are one-kin-in this damp and crumbling grave, this private secret place of our own, this deep chamber of earth where we may rot and mingle as the ants come, as the skin is covered over with mold.

That doesn't matter.

Let us be together, no face forgotten, laughter of each one clear as it ran some twenty years ago or twice that long, laughter lilting as the music of a ghostly violin, an uncertain violin, a perfect violin, our laughter our music that blended minds and souls and bound us all forever.

Fall softly on this great soft secret snuggling grave, my warm and singing rain.

What is this grave without rain? Our gentle southern rain.

Fall soft with kisses not to scatter this embrace in which we are living-I and they, the dead, as one. This crevice is our home. Let the drops be tears like song, more sound and lull than water, for I would have nothing here disturbed, but only lustrous sweet, among you all forever. Lily, snuggle against me now, and Mother let me burrow my face in your neck, but then we are one, and Karl has his arms round us all, and so does Father.

Flowers, come. There is no need to scatter broken stems or the crimson petals.

No need to bring them big bouquets all tied with shining ribbon.

Here the earth will celebrate this grave; the earth will bring its wild thin grass, its nodding blooms of simple buttercups and daisies and poppies, colors blue and yellow and pink, the mellow shades of the rampant untended and eternal garden.

Let me snuggle against you, let me lie in your arms, let me assure you that no outward sign of death means anything to me as much as love and that we lived, you and I, once, all of us, alive, and I would not be anywhere now but with you here in this slow and damp and safe corruption.

That consciousness follows me down to this final embrace is a gift! I am intimate with the dead, and yet I live to know it and savor it.

Let trees bow down to hide this place, let trees form over my eyes a dense and thickening net, not green but black as if it snared the night, so shut away the last prying eye, or vantage point, as the grass grows high-so that we may be alone, just us, you and I, those whom I so adored and cannot live without.

Sink. Sink deep into the earth. Feel the earth enclose you. Let the clods seal our quietude. I want nothing else.

And now, bound up with you and safe, I can say, Hell to all that tries to come between us.

Come, the steps of strangers on the stairs.

Break the lock, yes, break the wood, and pull the tubes away, and pump the air with white smoke. Do not bruise my arms for I am not here, I am in the grave; and it is an angry rigid image of me that you intrude upon. Yes, you see the sheets are clean, I could have told you! Wind him up, wind him thick, thick in the sheets, it does not matter one whit-you see, there is no blood, there is no virulent thing ~ can get you from him-he died not from open cankers but he starved inside as those with AIDS are wont to do, so that it hurt him even to draw breath, and what do you have left now to fear?

I am not with you or with those who ask questions of time and place and blood and sanity and numbers to be called; I cannot answer those who would Help. I am safe in the grave. I press my lips to my father's skull. I reach for my mother's bony hand. Let me hold you!

I can still hear the music. Oh, God, that this lone violinist would come through high grass and falling rain and the dense smoke of imagined night, envisioned darkness, to be with me still and play his mournful song, to give a voice to these words inside my head, as the earth grows ever more damp, and all things alive in it seem nothing but natural and kind and even a little beautiful.

All the blood in our dark sweet grave is gone, gone, gone, save mine, and in our bower of earth I bleed as simply as I sigh. If blood is wanted now for any reason under God, I have enough for all of us.

Fear won't come here. Fear is gone. Jangle the keys and stack the cups. Bang the pots on the iron stove downstairs. Fill the night with sirens if you will. Let the water rush and rush and rush, and the tub I see you not. I know you not.

No petty worry will come here, not to this grave where we lie. Fear gone-like youth itself and all that old anguish when I watched them commit you to the ground-coffin after coffin, and Father's of such fine wood, and Mother's, I can't remember, and Lily's so small and white, and the old gentleman not wanting to charge us a nickel because she was just a little girl. No, all that worry is gone.

Worry stops your ears to the real music. Worry doesn't let you fold your arms around the bones of those you love.

I am alive and with you now, truly only now realizing what it means that I will have you always with me!

Father, Mother, Karl, Lily, hold me!

Oh, it seems a sin to ask compassion of the dead, those who died in pain, those I couldn't save, those for whom I didn't have the right farewells or charms to drive off panic, or agony, of those who saw in the final careless, dissonant moments no tears perhaps or heard no pledge that I would mourn you forever.

I'm here now! With you! I know what it means to be dead. I let the mud cover me, I let my foot push deep into the spongy side of the grave.

This is a vision, my house. They matter not:

"That music, can you hear it?"

"I think she should get into the shower again now! I think she should be thoroughly disinfected!"

"Everything in that room should be burnt-"

"Oh, not that pretty four-poster bed, that's foolishness, they don't blow up the hospital room, do they, when somebody dies of this."

“...and his manuscript, don't you touch it."

No, don 't you dare touch his manuscript!

"Shhh, not in front of-"

"She's crazy, can't you see it?"

“...his mother is on the morning plane out of Gatwick."

“…absolutely stark raving mad."

"Oh, please, both of you, if you love your sister, for God's sake, be quiet. Miss Hardy, did you know her well?"

"Drink this, Triana."

This is my vision; my house. I sit in my living room, washed, scrubbed, as if I were the one to be buried, water dripping from my hair. Let the morning sun strike the mirrors. Toss the peacock's brilliant feathers out of the silver urn and all over the floor.

Don't hang a ghastly veil over all things bright. Look deep to find the phantom in the glass.

This is my house. And this is my garden, and my roses crawl on these railings outside and we are in our grave too. We are here and we are there, and they are one.

We are in the grave and we are in the house, and all else is a failure of imagination.

In this soft rainy realm, where water sings as it falls from the darkning leaves, as the earth falls from the uneven edges above, I am the bride, the daughter, the mother, all those venerable titles forming for me the precious claims I lay upon myself.

I have you always! Never never to let you leave me, never never to away.

All right. And so we made a mistake again. So we played our game. So we nudged at madness as if it were a thick door and then we slammed against it, like they slammed against Karl's door, but the door of madness didn't break, and that uncharted grave is the dream. Well, I can hear his music through it.

I don't even think they hear it. This is my voice in my head and his violin is his voice out there, and together we keep the secret, that this grave is my vision, and that I can't really be with you now, my dead ones. The living need me.

The living need me now, need me so, as they always need the bereaved after the death, so needy of those who have nursed the most, and sat the longest in the stillness, so needy with questions and suggestions and assertions and declarations, and papers to be signed. They need me to look up at the strangest smiles and find some way to receive with grace the most awkward sympathies.

But I'll come in time. I'll come. And when I do, the grave will hold us all. And the grass will grow above all of us.

Love and love and love I give you-let the earth grow wet. Let my limbs sink down.

Give me skulls like stones to press against my lips, give me bones to hold in my fingers, and if the hair is gone-like fine spun silk, it does not matter. Long hair I have to shroud all of us, isn’'t that so. Look at it, this long hair. Let me cover us all.

Death is not death as I once thought, when fear was trampled underfoot. Broken hearts do best forever beating upon the wintry windowpane.

Hold me, hold me, hold me here. Let me never never tarry in another place.

Forget the fancy lace, the deftly painted walls, the gleami ng inlay of the open desk.

The china that they take with such care now, piece by piece, to place now all over the table, cups and saucers ornamented with blue lace and gold. Karl's things. Turn around.

Don't feel these living arms.

The only thing important about coffee being poured from a silver spout is the way that the early light shines in it; the way that the deep brown of the coffee becomes amber and gold and yellow, and twists and turns like a dancer as it fills the cup, then stops, like a spirit snatched back into the pot.

Go back to where the garden breaks to ruin. You will find us all together. You will find us there.

From memory, a perfect picture: twilight: the Garden District Chapel; Our Mother of Perpetual Help; our little church within an old mansion. You have only to walk a block from my front gate to reach it. It is on Prytania Street. The tall windows are full of pink light. There are low guttering candles in red glass before a saint with a smiling face whom we love and revere as "The Little Flower." The darkness is like dust in this place. You can still move through it.

Mother and my sister Rosalind and I kneel at the cold marble Altar Rail. We lay down our bouquets-little flowers picked here and there from walls, through iron fences like our own-the wild bridal wreath, the pretty blue plumbago, the little gold and brown lantana. Never the gardeners' blooms. Only the loose tangle no one might miss from a viny gate. These are our bouquets, and we have nothing to bind them with, save our hands. We lay our bouquets on the Altar Rail, and when we make the Sign of the Cross and say our prayers, I get a doubt.

"Are you sure that the Blessed Mother and Jesus will get these flowers?"

Beneath the altar before us, the carved wooden figures of the Last Supper are set in their deep glass-covered niche, and above on the ornate cloth stand the regular bouquets of the Chapel which have such size, authority, giant spear-like flowers with snow-white blooms. These are powerful flowers! Flowers as powerful as tall wax candles.

"Oh, yes," says Mother. "When we leave, the Brother will come and he'll take our little flowers and he'll put them in a vase and he'll put them before the Baby Jesus over there or the Blessed Mother."

The Baby Jesus stands to the far right, dark beside the window now. But I can still see the world He holds in his hands, and the gold that glints on His crown, and I know that His fingers are raised in blessing, and that he is the Infant Jesus of Prague in that statue, with His fancy flaring pink cape and lovely blooming cheeks.

But about the flowers, I don't think it's so. The flowers are too humble. Who will care about such flowers left like that in the gloaming, the chapel now full of shadows that I can feel because my Mother is a little afraid, clutching the hands of her two little girls, Rosalind and Triana, come, as we make our genuflection and then turn to go out. We are wearing Mary Janes that click on a dark linoleum floor. The holy water is warm in the font. The night breathes with light, but not enough anymore to come inside among the pews.

I worry for the flowers.

Well, I worry not anymore for such things.

I cherish only the memory, that we were there, because if I can see and feel it and hear this violin that sings this song, then I am there again, and as I said-Mother, we are together.

I worry not for all the rest. Would she, my child, have lived had I moved Heaven and Earth to take her to a faraway clinic? Would he, my Father, have not died if the oxygen had been adjusted just so? Was she afraid, my Mother, when she said, "I'm dying" to the cousins who cared for her? Did she want one of us? Good God! Stop it!

Not for the living, not for the dead, not for the flowers of fifty years ago, I won't relive the accusations!

Saints in the flicker of the chapel do not answer. The icon of Our Mother of Perpetual Help only gleams in solemn shadow. The Infant Jesus of Prague holds court with a jeweled crown and eyes with no less luster.

But you, my dead, my flesh, my treasures, those whom I have completely and totally loved, all of you with me in the grave now-vithout eyes, or flesh to warm me-you are with me!

All partings were illusions. Everything is perfect.

"The music stopped."

"Thank God."

"Do you really think so?" That was Rosalind's soft deep voice, my outspoken sister.

"The guy was terrific. That wasn't just music."

"He is very good, I'll give him that much." This was Glenn, her husband and my beloved brother-in-law.

"He was here when I came." Miss Hardy speaking. "In fact, if he hadn't come playing his violin, I would never have found her. Can you see him out there?"

My sister Katrinka:

"I think she should leave now for the hospital for an entire battery of tests; we have to make absolutely sure that she did not contract-"

"Hush, I won't have you talk this way!" Thank you, perfect stranger.

"Triana, this is Miss Hardy, dear, can you look at me? Forgive me, dear, for quarreling so with your sisters. Forgive me, dear. But I want you to drink this now.

It's just a cup of chocolate. Remember when you came that afternoon, and we drank chocolate and you said you loved it, and there's lots of cream and I'd like you to have this

. .

I looked up. How fresh and pretty the living room was in the early sun, and how the china shone on the table. Round tables. I have always loved round tables. All the music disks and cookie wrappers and cans had been taken away. The white plaster flowers on the ceiling made their proper w reath, no longer degraded by detritus beneath them.

I got up and went to the window, and lifted back the heavy yellowing curtain. The whole world was outside, right up to the sky itself; and the leaves scuttling on the dry porch right in front of me.

The morning race for downtown had begun. There came the clatter of trucks. I saw the leaves on the oak above shiver with the thunder of so many wheels. I felt the house itself tremble. But it had trembled so for a hundred years or more, and would not fall down. People knew that now. They didn't come to tear down the splendid houses with the white columns now. They didn't vomit out lies about these houses being impossible to keep, or heat. They fought to save them.

Someone shook me. It was my sister Katrinka. She looked so distraught, her narrow face bitter with anger; anger was so much her friend. Anger just jumped up and down in her, waiting any second to get out, and it was out now, and she could barely speak to me she was so furious.

"I want you to go upstairs."

"For what?" I said coldly. I haven't been afraid of you for years and years, I thought. Not since Faye left, I suppose. Faye was the smallest of us all. Faye was the one whom we all loved.

"I want you to wash again, wash all over, and then go to the hospital."

"You're a fool," I said. "You always were. I don't have to."

I looked at Miss Hardy.

At some time or other during this long and cacophonous night, she'd gone home and changed into one of her pretty shirt-waist dresses, and her hair was freshly combed. Her smile was full of comfort.

"They took him away?" I asked Miss Hardy.

"His book, his book on St. Sebastian, I put all of it away, except the last pages.

They were on the table near the bed. They-"

My sweet brother-in-law Glenn spoke: "I put them downstairs; they're safe, with the rest."

That's right, I had showed Glenn where Karl's work was stashed, in case... burn everything in the room.

Behind me, people quarreled. I could hear Rosalind trying to quiet the younger ever anxious Katrinka's long clench-teeth diatribes. Someday Katrinka will break her teeth in mid-speech.

"She's crazy!" said Katrinka. "And she's probably got the virus!"

"No, now stop it, Trink, please, I'm begging you now." Rosalind didn't know anymore how to be unkind. Whatever she had known in childhood had long ago been weeded out, and replaced.

I turned around, looked at Rosalind. She sat slumped at the table, Large and sleepy looking and with her dark eyebrows raised. She ma de little gesture and said in her frank deep voice:

"They'll cremate him." She sighed. "It's the law. Don't worry. I made sure they didn't cart out the room board by board." She laughed, a smug, smart-alecky laugh, which was perfect. "You leave it to Katrinka, she'll have the whole city block torn down." She shook with her laughter.

Katrinka began to roar.

I smiled at Rosalind. I wondered if she was afraid about money. Karl had been so generous with money. No doubt everyone was thinking about money. Karl's effortless doles.

There would be some quarrel about funeral arrangements. There always is, no matter what is done before, and Karl had done everything. Cremation. I could not think of this! In my grave, among those I love, are no undifferentiated ashes.

Rosalind would never say it but she had to be thinking of money. It was Karl who gave Rosalind and her husband, Glenn, the money to live, to run their small vintage book and record shop which never actually made a dime, not so much as I know. Was she afraid the money would stop? I wanted to reassure her.

Miss Hardy raised her voice. Katrinka slammed the door. Katrinka is one of only two adults I know who actually slams doors when she is angry. The other was miles away, long gone out of my life, and dearly remembered for better things than such petty violence.

Rosalind, our eldest, the heaviest, very plump now with her hair all white yet beautifully curly as it had always been-she had the loveliest richest hair-just sat there still making that shrug, that smirk.

"You don't have to rush to the hospital," she said. "You know that." Rosalind had been a nurse for too long, lugging oxygen tanks and cleaning up blood. "No rush at all,"

she assured me with authority.

I know a better place than this, I said or thought. I had only to close my eyes and the room swam and the grave came and there was that painful wonder: Which is dream and which is real?

I laid my forehead on the windowpane, and it was cold, and his music. .. the music of my vagabond violinist. . .1 called to it. You're there, aren't you? Come on, I know you didn't go away. Did you think I wasn't listening. . . ? It came again, the violin. Florid yet low, anguished, yet full of naive celebration.

And behind me Rosalind began to hum in low tune, a phrase or so behind him... to hum along, to join her voice to his distant voice.

"You hear him now?" I said.

"Yeah," she said with her characteristic shrug. "You've got some friend out there, like a nightingale. And the sun didn't drive him off. Sure, I hear him."

My hair was dripping water on the floor. Katrinka was sobbing in the hallway and I could not make out the other two voices, except to know that they were women's voices.

"Just can't go through this right now, I can't go through this," Katrinka said, "and she's crazy. Can't you see? I can't, I can't, I can't."

It seemed a fork in the road. I knew where the grave was and just how deep, and I could go there. Why didn't I?

His music had moved into a slow but lofty melody, something merging with the morning itself; as though we were leaving the graveyard together. In a disquieting yet vivid flash I saw our little bouquets on the white marble Altar Rail of the Chapel as I looked back.

"Come on, Triana!" My mother looked so pretty, her hair in a beret, her voice so patient, her eyes so big. "Come on, Triana!"

You're going to die separated from us, Mother. Beautiful and without a gray hair in your head. When the time comes I won't even have the sense to kiss you goodbye the last time I see you. I'll only be glad you're going because you're so drunk and sick and I'm so tired of taking care of Katrinka and Faye. Mother, you will die in a terrible, terrible way, a drunken woman, swallowing her tongue. And I will give birth to a little girl who looks like you, has your big round eyes and lovely temples and forehead, and she'll die, Mother, die before she's six years oId, surrounded by machines during the few minutes, the very few minutes, Mother, when I tried as they say to catch some skep. I caught her death, I-Get thee behind me, all such torment. Rosalind and I run ahead; Mother walks slowly on the flags behind us, a smiling woman; she's not afraid in the dusk now, the sky is too vibrant. These are our years. The war has not come to an end. Cars passing slowly on Prytania Street look like humpback crickets or beetles.

"I said, Stop it!" I talked to my own head. I put my hands on my wet hair. How dreadful to be in this room with all this noise, and dripping with water. Listen to Miss Hardy's voice. She is taking command.

Outside, the sun fell down on the porches, on the cars streaking by, on the old peeling wooden streetcars as they crossed right in front of me, the uptown car clanging its bell, with all the drama of a San Francisco cable car.

"How can she do this to us?" sobbed Katrinka. But that was beyond the door. The door she had slammed. She was bellowing in the hallway.

The doorbell rang. I was too far over to the edge of the house to glimpse who had come up the steps.

What I saw were the white azaleas against the fence all the way to the corner and around where the fence turns. How lovely, how sublimely lovely. Karl had paid for all that, gardeners and mulch and carpenters and hammers and nails and white paint for the columns, look, the Corinthian capitals restored, the acanthus leaves rising to hold high the roof; and look, the clean blue for the porch roof so that the wasps thought it was the sky and would not nest up there.

"Come on, honey." This was a man's voice, a man I knew, but not so well, a man I trusted, but couldn't think of his name just now, perhaps because in the background Katrinka was shouting and shouting.

"Triana, honey," he said. Grady Dubosson, my own lawyer. He was all spiffed up, full suit and tie, and didn't even look sleepy at all, and perfectly in command of his serious face as though he knew, like so many people here, just how to deal with death and not to put a false face or a denial on it.

"Don't worry, Triana darlin'," he said in the most natural, confiding voice. "I won't let them touch a silver fork. You come with Dr. Guidry and you go downtown. Rest.

There can't be any ceremony till the others are back from London."

"Karl's book, there were some pages upstairs."

Glenn's consoling voice again, deep, southern: "I got them, Triana. I took his papers down and nobody's going to incinerate anything up there-"

"I'm sorry for the trouble I've made," I whispered.

"Absolutely cracked!" That was Katrinka.

Rosalind sighed. "He didn't look to me like he suffered, just like he went to sleep."

She was saying that to comfort me. I turned around again and made a small secret of thanks to her. She caught it; she gave me her soft beam.

I loved her utterly. She pushed her thick framed glasses up on her nose. All her young life, my father shouted at her to push her glasses on her nose, but it never really worked because she had, unlike him, a rather small nose. And she looked the way he had always hated her-dreamy and sloppy, and sweet, with glasses falling down, smoking a cigarette, with ashes on her coat, but full of love, her body heavy and shapeless with age. I loved her so.

"I don't think he suffered at all," she said. "Don't pay any attention to the Trink.

Hey, Trink, did you ever think about all the beds in the hotels that you and Martin sleep in-like who's been in them, I mean, like you, with AIDS?"

I wanted to laugh.

"Come on, darlin'," Grady said.

Dr. Guidry took my hand in both of his. What a young man he was. I can't get used to doctors now being younger than me. And Dr. Guidry is so blond and so utterly clean, and always, in the top pocket of his coat, is a small Bible. You know he can't be a Catholic if he carries a Bible like that. He must be a Baptist. I feel so ageless myself.

But that's because I'm dead, right? I'm in the grave.

No. That never works for very long.

"I want you to follow my advice," said Dr. Guidry as gently as if he were kissing me. "And you let Grady take care of things."

"It's stopped," said Rosalind.

"What?" demanded Katrinka. "What's stopped?" She stood in the hallway door.

She was blowing her nose. She wadded up the Kleenex and threw it on the floor. She glared at me. "Did you ever think what this kind of thing does to the rest of us?"

I didn't answer her.

"The violinist," Rosalind said. "Your troubadour. I think he's gone away."

"I never heard any damned violinist," Katrinka said, clenching her teeth. "Why are you talking about a violinist! You think this violinist is more important than what I'm trying to tell you!"

Miss Hardy came in, walking past Katrinka as if Katrinka did not exist. Miss Hardy was wearing the cleanest white shoes. It must be spring then, because Garden District ladies never wear white shoes except at the proper time of year. But I was sure it was cold.

She had a coat and scarf for me. "Now, come darling, let me help you dress."

Katrinka stood staring at me. Her lip trembled and her bulbous reddened eyes ran with tears. How miserable her life had been, always. At least Mother had not been drunk when she was born. Katrinka was healthy and pretty, whereas Faye had barely survived, a tiny smiling thing that they had put in a machine for weeks, who never believed in her own special elfin loveliness.

"Why don't you just leave?" I asked Katrinka. "There are enough people here.

Where's Martin? Call him and tell him to come get you." Martin was her husband, a real estate wonder and sometime lawyer of considerable local renown.

Rosalind laughed, smug and smirking and sort of to herself but for me. And then I knew. Of course.

And so did Rosalind, who folded her arms and sat forward, her heavy breasts resting on the table. She pushed her glasses up.

"You belong in the nuthouse," Katrinka said, trembling. "You were crazy when your daughter died! You didn't need to take all that extreme care of Father! You had a nurse here night and day. You had doctors coming and going. You're crazy and you can't stay in this house-"

She stopped; even she was ashamed of her clumsiness.

"I must say, you are one outspoken young woman," Miss Hardy said. "If you'll excuse me .

"Miss Hardy, you must accept my thanks," I said. "I'm so terribly, terribly-"

She gestured for me to be quiet, that it was all forgiven.

I looked at Rosalind and Rosalind was laughing softly still, her head moving from side to side, peering up at Katrinka over her glasses, a big authoritative and beautiful woman in her weight and her age.

And Katrinka, so athletically and fetchingly thin, with her breasts pointed fiercely through the silk of her short-sleeve blouse. Such small arms. In a way, Katrinka had of the four of us gotten the perfect body, and she was only one with blond hair, true blond hair.

A silence. What was it? Rosalind had drawn herself up and lifted her chin.

"Katrinka," Rosalind sa)d now under her breath, filling the whole room by the solemnity of her tone. "You ain't getting this house." She slapped the table. She laughed out loud.

I burst out laughing. Not very loud, of course. It was too funny, really.

"How dare you accuse me of this!" Katrinka turned on me. "You stay here for two days with a dead body and I try to make them realize you're sick, you have to be committed, you have to be checked, you have to be in bed, and you think I want this house, you think I came here at a moment like this, as if I didn't have my own house mortgaged to the hilt, my own husband, my own daughters, and you think, you dare say that to me in front of people we hardly..."

Grady spoke to her. It was a low but urgent flow of words. The doctor was trying to take Katrinka by the arm.

Rosalind shrugged. "Trink," she said. "I hate to remind you. It's Triana's house until she dies. It's hers and Faye's if Faye is alive. And Triana may be crazy, but she ain't dead."

And then I couldn't help laughing again, a small mischievous laugh, and Rosalind laughed too.

"I wish Faye were here," I said to Rosalind.

Faye was our youngest sister by my mother and father. Faye was just a little waif of a woman, an angel, born from a sick and starved womb.

No one had seen my beloved Faye in over two years, nor heard even a single word by phone or post from her. Faye!

"But, you know, maybe that was the trouble all along," I confessed, almost crying, wiping at my eyes.

"What do you mean?" asked Rosalind. She looked too sweet and calm to be a normal person. She got up, awkwardly, hoisting her bulk from the chair, and she came to me, and she kissed me on the cheek.

"In times of trouble, we always want Faye," I said. "Always. We always needed Faye. Call Faye. Get Faye to help with this and that. Everybody always needed Faye, wanted Faye, depended on Faye."

Katrinka stepped in front of me. It came as a shock, the full dislike in her expression, the full personal contempt. Would I never, never get used to it? From childhood I had seen this impatient, raging contempt, this intense personal dislike, this distaste! This aversion in her face that made me want to shrivel and give in and turn away and be silent and win no argument or fight or point of discussion.

"Well, Faye might be alive right now," Katrinka said, "if you hadn't financed her running off and disappearing without a trace, you and your dead husband."

Rosalind told her plainly to shut up. Faye? Dead?

This was too much. I smiled to myself. Everyone knew it was too much. Faye had disappeared, yes, but dead? And still, what did I feel, the big sister? A protective fear for Trink, that she'd indeed gone way too far, and they'd really insult her now, poor Katrinka. She'd cry and cry and never understand. They'd all despise her for this and she'd be so wounded.

"Don't-" I started to say.

Dr. Guidry made motions to hurry me from the room. Grady took my arm.

I was confused. Rosalind was at my side.

Katrinka wailed on and on. She was going to pieces in there. Somebody had to help her. Maybe it would be Glenn. Glenn always helped people, even Katrinka.

The implication of the words struck me again-"might be alive."

"Faye's not dead, is she?" I asked. If I'd known for sure after these agonizing years of waiting for Faye, well, then I could have invited her down into the wet grave with us, and we could have been there, Faye and Lily and Mother and Father and Karl, Faye included in my litany. But Faye couldn't be dead. Not my precious Faye.

It made a lie of all my eccentricity, my seemingly excessive wisdom and high-toned feeling. "Not Faye."

"There's no word on Faye at all," said Rosalind next to my ear. "Faye's probably drinking tequila in a truck stop in Mexico." She kissed me once more. I felt her heavy tender arm.

We stood in the front door, Grady and I-the mad widow and the kindly elderly family lawyer.

I love the front door of my house. It's a big double door, right in the middle of the house, and you go out on the wide front porch and you can walk to the left or the right, and the porch wraps all the way around the sides of the house. It's so pretty. Not a day of my life has ever passed that I have not thought of this house and thought of it as pretty.

Years ago, Faye and I used to dance on the porch of this house. Eight years younger than me, she was small enough to be in my arms, like a monkey, and we would sing, "Casey, he waltzed with the girl he adored and the band played on-"

And look at the azaleas in the patches by the steps, blood red, and so thick! Of course it was spring. Everywhere they bloomed, these pampered plants-a real Garden District house with its snow-white columns.

And look, Miss Hardy didn't have on white shoes at all. They were gray.

Back inside the house, Rosalind roared at Katrinka. "Don't talk about Faye, not now! Don't talk about Faye."

And Katrinka's words came in one of those long dramatic drawn-out growls...

Someone had lifted my foot. It was Miss Hardy, putting a slipper on my foot. The gate stood open below. Grady had my arm.

Dr. Guidry stood beside an open ambulance.

Grady spoke again, telling me if I would go to Mercy Hospital, I could walk out just as soon as I wanted to. Just let them get some fluids and nourishment into me.

Dr. Guidry came to take my hand. "You're dehydrated, Triana, you haven't eaten.

Nobody's talking about committing you anywhere. I want you to go into the hospital, that's all. I want you to rest. And I promise you, no one will do anything or test for anything."

I sighed. Everything was getting brighter.

"Angel of God," I whispered, "my guardian dear, to whom God's love commits me here.

Suddenly I saw them clearly around me.

"Oh, I'm sorry," I said, "I'm so so sorry . . . I am so very sorry for all this, I . .

. I'm sorry. " I cried. "You can test. Yes, test. Do what has to be done. I'm sorry...

I'm so sorry...

I stopped on the front walk.

There were my beloved Althea and Lacomb at the gate, and they were so concerned. Maybe all these white people-doctor, lawyer, lady in gray shoes-held them back.

Althea made a lip as if she would cry, her heavy arms folded, and she tilted her head.

Lacomb said in his deep voice, "We're here, boss."

I was about to answer.

But I saw something across the street.

"What is it, honey?" Grady said. Lovely to uch of Mississippi in his accent.

"That's the violinist." Just a distant figure in black, far across both sides of the Avenue, and half his way down the Third Street block towards Carondelet, glancing back.

Now he was gone.

Or at least the traffic and the trees had made him seem to disappear. I'd caught him though, distinct for a second, holding his instrument, this strange watchman of the night, glancing back and walking with those great even strides.

I got into the ambulance and lay down on the stretc her, which is not apparently the normal way it is done, because it was rather awkward, but we did it that way, obviously because I began to climb in the ambulance before anyone could stop me. I covered up with the sheet and closed my eyes. Mercy Hospital. All my aunts who had been nuns there for so many years were gone. I wondered if my vagabond fiddler would be able to find Mercy Hospital.

"You know that man's not real!" I woke with a shock. The ambulance was moving into traffic. "But then... Rosalind, and Miss Hardy. They heard him."

Or was that too a dream in a life where dream and reality had woven themselves so tight that one inevitably triumphs over the other?