Lasher (28 page)

“Hello there, Michael Curry,” she said. “I’ve come to see you. I’ve come to talk to Mona Mayfair.”

Good Lord, what a shock that gave him. How alarmed he was. But she sang it out loud and clear.

“I know Mona’s inside. You tell her to come out.”

And then there was her sleepy girl, in a white gown, all frazzled and yawning the way children do, as if no one is holding them accountable.

Up in the treetops they stood behind the black railing, and it struck her suddenly what had happened, where they had been together. Oh, good Lord, and Gifford had warned her about this, that Mona was “on the path” so to speak, and must be watched, and that child hadn’t been looking for the “Victrola at all, she’d been looking for Mary Beth’s style of Irish boy, Rowan Mayfair’s husband: Michael Curry.

Ancient Evelyn felt a lovely desire to laugh and laugh.

As Stella would have said, “What a scream!”

But Ancient Evelyn was tired and her fingers curled over the black wire of the fence and she was relieved as she bowed her head to hear the big front door open, to hear naked feet slap across the porch, that intimate unmistakable patter, and to see Mona standing there, until she realized what she had to tell Mona.

“What is it, Ancient Evelyn?” she asked. “What’s happened?”

“You didn’t see anything, child? She didn’t call your name? Think, my precious girl, before I tell you. No, it’s not your mother.”

And then Mona’s little-girl face crumpled and became wet with tears, and, opening the gate, she wiped at her eye with the back of her hand.

“Aunt Gifford,” she cried in a wee voice, so fragile and young and so unlike Mona the Strong, and Mona the Genius. “Aunt Gifford! And I had been so glad that she wasn’t here.”

“You didn’t do it, darling child,” she said. “Blood in the sand. Happened this morning. Maybe she didn’t suffer. Maybe she’s in heaven this very minute looking down on us and wondering why we are sad.”

Michael Curry stood at the top of the marble steps, robe properly closed, with slippers on his feet, hands in his pockets, hair even combed.

“Why, that young man isn’t sick,” she said.

Mona broke into sobs, staring helplessly from Ancient Evelyn to the ruddy dark-haired man on the porch.

“Who said he was dying of a bad heart?” asked Ancient Evelyn as she watched him come down the steps. She reached out and clasped the young man’s hand. “There’s nothing wrong with this strapping young man at all!”

H
E HAD ASKED
them to gather in the library. The little brown portable gramophone was in the corner and that splendid necklace of long pearls, and the little packet of pictures of Stella and Ancient Evelyn when they had been young together. But he didn’t want to talk about that now. He had to talk about Rowan.

It made Mona happy that these things had been found, very happy, in the middle of her grief for the death of Gifford, but Mona was not his concern. He was suffering agonies over his indiscretion with Mona; well, one minute he was, and the next he had other things to think about. Like that two months had passed, and he had lived in this house like one of its ghosts, and that was over, and he had to search for his wife.

They had just come back from Ryan’s house, from the two hours of drinking and talking after Gifford’s funeral. They had come back to the house—come for this conference, and come merely to be with each other a little longer, crying for Gifford as it was the family custom to do.

All during last night’s wake and the funeral today he had seen the looks of amazement on their faces as they shook his hand, as they told him he looked “so much better,” as they whispered about him to one another. “Look at Michael! Michael’s come back from the dead.”

There was the awful raucous shock of Gifford’s untimely death on the one hand—a perfect wife and mother removed from life, leaving behind a brilliant and beloved lawyer husband and three exquisite children. And then there was the shock that Michael was OK, that the legendary abandoned husband, the latest male victim of the Mayfair legacy, was not actually wasting away. Michael was fine. He was up and dressed and driving his own car in the funeral procession. And he wasn’t short of breath, or dizzy or sick to his stomach.

And he and Dr. Rhodes had fought it out about the drugs in
the foyer of the funeral home, and Michael had won. He wasn’t experiencing any bad withdrawal. He had emptied the bottles, and then put them away. Later he would check the labels. He would discover what he had been taking, but not now. The sickness was over. He had work to do.

And there was Mona always in the corner of his eyes, staring at him, and now and then whispering, “I told you so.” Mona with her slightly chubby cheeks and pale pale freckles, and her long rich red hair. No one ever called that kind of redhead a carrot top. People always turned to stare.

And then there was the house. How explain about the house? That the house felt alive again. That the moment he’d wakened in Mona’s arms, he’d known the old awareness—of something unseen, and present, and watching. The house creaked as it had before. It looked as it had before. Then of course there was the entire mystery of the music in the parlor and what he had done with Mona. Had his powers to see the invisible actually returned?

He and Mona had never talked for one moment about what had happened. Nor had Eugenia ever said a word. Poor old soul. Undoubtedly she thought him a rapist and a monster. And technically he was both, and he had apparently gotten away with it. But he would never forget the sight of her, so real, so familiar, standing before a small portable gramophone that had not been there, a gramophone that looked exactly like the one later found in the library wall.

No, they had talked about none of it yet. The death of Gifford had swept everything in its path.

Ancient Evelyn had held Mona in her arms all yesterday morning as Mona cried over Gifford, struggling to remember a dream in which she felt she had struck down her aunt, deliberately and hatefully. Of course it was all irrational. She knew that. They all knew that. Finally he had taken Mona’s hand, and said, “Whatever happened here, it was my fault, and you didn’t kill your aunt. It wasn’t you. It was a coincidence. How could what you were doing here kill her?”

And Mona, indeed, had seemed to snap back with the fierce exuberance of the very young—and something else too, a steadiness he had sensed in her from the beginning, the cold self-sufficiency of a drunkard’s child, of which he knew a great deal on his own account. She was no ordinary little girl, Mona. But it still had been wrong, a man of his age with a girl of thirteen. How could he have done it? But the strange thing was
this—the house did not despise him for it, and it seemed that the house knew.

For the moment, however, the sin had been lost in the shuffle. Just lost. Last night, before the wake, Mona and Ancient Evelyn had taken out the books from the shelf and discovered the pearls and the gramophone and Violetta’s waltz on a shiny old RCA Victor record. The same gramophone. He had wanted to ask—but they had talked in rushed, excited voices. And Gifford had been waiting for them.

“We cannot play it now,” said Ancient Evelyn, “not with Gifford dead. Close the piano. Drape the mirrors. Gifford would have wanted it that way.”

Henri had driven Mona and Ancient Evelyn home to change for the wake, and then out to the funeral parlor. Michael had gone with Bea, Aaron, his Aunt Vivian and several others. The world had baffled him and confronted him and shamed him in its vivid beauty, the night alive with new flowers, trees laden with new leaves. The gentle nighttime of spring.

Gifford looked all wrong in the coffin. Short hair too black, face too thin, lips too red, too sharply pointed all over, even to the tips of her folded fingers, and her small breasts beneath the austere wool of her suit. One of those mannequins upon which they have skimped that does not wear clothes well in its stiffness, but makes even fashion look like junk. Frozen. You would have thought it was a deep-freeze, the coffin. And the Metairie funeral home was just like any one anywhere in the nation, carpeted in gray, with grand plaster ornament beneath a low ceiling, and packed with flowers and middling Queen Anne chairs.

But it had been a Mayfair wake for sure, with lots of wine and talk and crying, and several Catholic dignitaries come to pay their respects, and flocks of nuns like birds in their blue and white, and dozens of business friends and lawyer friends, and Metairie neighbors, who might as well have been blue-birds in their blue suits, also.

Shock, misery, nightmare. With faces of wax the immediate family had received each grieving relative or friend. And the world outside shone in spring splendor, whenever in the course of things he had stepped out the doors.

Even the simplest things blazed in Michael’s eyes, after his long illness, his long housebound depression, as if they’d just been invented—the foolish gold curlicues on the plaster, the moist and perfect flowers beneath the outside fluorescent light.
Never had Michael seen so many children cry at a funeral, so many children brought to witness, to pray by the coffin, and to kiss the departed, laid out in Betty Crocker perfection, her peculiarities lost to clichés in this final public gesture, as she slept on her white satin bed.

He’d come home alone at eleven o’clock and gone through his clothes, packed up his suitcase and made his plans. He’d walked through the whole house. It was then that he fully sensed the difference, that it was inhabited again by something he could almost feel and see. No, that was not it. The house itself talked to him; the house itself responded.

Madness, perhaps, to think the house was alive, but he had known it before in mingled happiness and misery, and he knew it again, and it was better than the two wretched months of aloneness, of sickness, and drug fog, of being “half in love with easeful death” and the house in silence and without personality, witnessing nothing, having no use for him at all.

He’d stared a long time at the gramophone and the pearls that lay as carelessly as Mardi Gras beads on the carpet. Priceless pearls. He could still hear Ancient Evelyn’s strange voice, both deep and soft, and pretty all at once, talking on and on to Mona.

Nobody else seemed to know or care about these treasures from the compartment beneath the bookcase wall; they lay in the shadowy corner near the heap of books, like so much junk. Nobody touched them or noticed them.

Now was the conference after the funeral. Had to be done.

He would have had it at Ryan’s house if that had been easier for him. But Ryan and Pierce said they had to go to the office, they had no choice. They confessed they were tired of visiting now, and they’d come up to First Street on the way, they didn’t mind. They were very concerned about Rowan. He must not think they had forgotten about Rowan for one single moment. Poor wretched father and son.

In the sharp glare of attention, they looked no less perfect—Ryan with his tanned skin and smooth white hair and eyes that were so opaque and blue. Pierce, the son whom anyone in the world would want, brilliant, well-mannered, and so obviously shattered by the fact of his mother’s death. Didn’t seem it ought to happen this way; they should have had insurance against it. What was death to the country club Mayfairs, as Bea had put it? It had been more than kind of them to agree to come.

But Michael could not put this meeting off. He really couldn’t. He’d wasted so much time. He’d lived in this house like a spook since he’d come home from the hospital. Was it the death of Gifford, random and terrible and irrelevant, which had wakened him from his stupor? He knew it was not. It was Mona.

Well, they would gather now, and he would explain that he must take action regarding Rowan, he was packed and ready to go.

That is what they had to understand. He had been lying here under a curse, a man in a dream, hurt in his heart that Rowan had left. He had failed.

And then there had been the medal. The Archangel medal. It had been in Gifford’s purse in Destin. And when Ryan had put that in his hand, at graveside, no less, as they embraced, he had known. I must find Rowan. I must do what I was sent here to do. I must do what I want to do. I have to move. I have to be strong again.

The medal. Gifford had found it out by the pool some time ago, maybe even Christmas Day, Ryan wasn’t sure; she kept meaning to give it to Michael. But she was afraid to upset him with the medal. She’d been sure the medal was his. There had been blood on the medal. And here it was, all cleaned up and shiny. It had fallen out of her purse while Ryan was going through it. Little graveside chat, no more than a few seconds in the cool marble mausoleum with the noonday sun streaming in, and hundreds waiting to shake Ryan’s hand. “Gifford would want me to give you this without further delay.”

So what time was there to feel appropriately guilty about the little redhead who’d slept in his arms, who’d said, “Throw out those drugs. You don’t need them.”

He held the door open for them as they entered the library.

“Come in,” he said, feeling a little strange as he always did, being the master of this, their house, and gestured for Ryan and Pierce and Aaron Lightner to sit before the desk. He took his customary place behind it. He saw Pierce look at the little phonograph, and those long pearls, but they would get to that later on.

“Now, I know how bad this is,” he said to Ryan. Someone had to start things. “You buried your wife today. And my heart goes out to you. I wish I could let this wait. Everything should be made to wait. But I have to talk about Rowan.”

“Of course you do,” said Ryan immediately. “And we’re
here to tell you what we know. We don’t know much, however.”

“I see. I can’t get a word out of Randall or Lauren. They say, Talk to Ryan, Ryan knows everything, and so I’ve asked you to come and tell me what has been going on. I’ve been like a man in a coma. I have to find Rowan. I’m packed and ready to go.”

Ryan looked amazingly composed, as if he’d thrown an inner switch to Business Mode; there was nothing bitter or resentful in his attitude. Pierce on the other hand was still crushed; he wore a look of inconsolable grief. It was doubtful he was hearing Michael’s words, or should even be here.