Lasher (24 page)

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.