Lasher (12 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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