Lasher (23 page)

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.”

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.