The Witching Hour (125 page)

Aaron Lightner was already waiting for her at the gate, a small-boned man in light, tropical clothing, with a prim British look to him, even to the walking stick in his hand.

She had called him at eight and asked for this appointment, and she could see even from a distance that he was deeply worried about her reaction to what she’d read.

She took her time crossing the intersection. She approached him slowly, her eyes lowered, her mind still swimming with the long story and all the detail which she’d so quickly absorbed.

When she found herself standing in front of him, she took his hand. She had not rehearsed what she meant to say. It would be an ordeal for her. But it felt good to be here, to be holding his hand, pressing it warmly, as she studied the expression on his open and agreeable face.

“Thank you,” she said, her voice sounding weak and inadequate to her. “You’ve answered all the worst and most tormenting questions of my life. In fact, you can’t know what you’ve done for me. You and your watchers—they found the darkest part of me; and you knew what it was, and you turned a light on it—and you connected it to something greater and older, and just as real.” She shook her head, still holding his hand, struggling to continue. “I don’t know how to say what I want to say,” she confessed. “I’m not alone anymore! I mean me, all of me, not merely the name and the part that the family wants. I mean who I am.” She sighed. The words were so clumsy, and the feelings behind them so enormous, as enormous as her relief. “I thank you,” she said, “that you didn’t keep your secrets. I thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

She could see his amazement, and his faint confusion. Slowly he nodded. And she felt his goodness, and above all his willingness to trust.

“What can I do for you now?” he asked, with total and disarming candor.

“Come inside,” she said. “Let’s talk.”

E
LEVEN O’CLOCK
. He sat up in the dark, staring at the digital clock on the table. How ever did he sleep that long? He’d left the drapes open so the light would wake him. But somebody had closed them. And his gloves? Where were his gloves? He found them and slipped them on, and then climbed out of bed.

The briefcase was gone. He knew it before he looked behind the chair. Foiled.

At once he put on his robe and walked down the little hallway to the living room. No one here. Just the scorched smell of old coffee coming from the kitchen, and the lingering perfume of a cigarette. Made him want one immediately.

And there on the coffee table, the empty sack of a briefcase, and the file—manila folders in two neat stacks.

“Ah Rowan,” he groaned. And Aaron was never going to forgive him. And Rowan had read the part about Karen Garfield and Dr. Lemle dying after they had seen her. She’d read all the delicious gossip gleaned over the years from Ryan Mayfair and from Bea and from others whom she had most surely met at the funeral. That, and a thousand other things he couldn’t even think of at the moment.

If he went into the bedroom and discovered that all her clothes were gone … But her clothes weren’t here anyway, they were in her room.

He stood there scratching his head, uncertain what to do first—ring her room, call Aaron, or go screaming crazy. And then he saw the note.

It was right beside the two stacks of manila folders—a single sheet of hotel stationery covered in a very clear, straight hand.

“The Witch of Endor.” Who was the Witch of Endor? Ah, the woman to whom King Saul had gone to conjure the faces of his ancestors? Don’t overinterpret. It means she has survived the file. The whiz kid. The brain surgeon. Read the file! It had taken him two days. Read the file!

He peeled off his right glove and laid his hand on the note. Flash of Rowan, dressed, bending over the desk in the little room off this parlor. Then a flash of someone who’d put the stationery here days ago, a uniformed maid, and other foolish things, cascading in, none of which mattered. He lifted his fingers, waited until the tingling stopped. “Give me Rowan,” he said, and touched the paper again. Rowan and Rowan not angry, but deeply secretive and … what? In the midst of an adventure?

Yes, what he was sensing was a strange, defiant excitement. And this he understood perfectly. He saw her again, with shocking clarity, only it was someplace else, and at once the image was confused, and then he lost it, and he put back on the glove.

He sat there for a moment, drawing back into himself, instinctively hating this power, yet thinking about the question of excitement. He remembered what Aaron had told him last night. “I can teach you how to use it; but it will never be precise; it will always be confusing.” God, how he hated it. Hated even the sharp sense of Rowan that had invaded him and wouldn’t leave him; he would have much preferred the visceral memories of the bedroom and her lovely deep grosgrain voice speaking to him so softly and honestly and simply. Much preferred to hear it from her own lips. Excitement!

He called Room Service.

“Send me a big breakfast, Eggs Benedict, grits, yeah, a big bowl of grits, extra side of ham, toast, and a full pot of coffee. And tell the waiter to use his key. I’ll be getting dressed, and add a twenty percent tip for the waiter, please, and bring me some cold cold water.”

He read the note again. Aaron and Rowan were together now. This filled him with apprehension. And now he understood how fearful Aaron had been when he himself had begun to read the materials. And he hadn’t wanted to listen to Aaron. He had wanted to read. Well, he couldn’t blame Rowan.

He couldn’t shake this uneasiness either. She didn’t understand Aaron. And he certainly didn’t understand her. And she
thought he was naive. He shook his head. And then there was Lasher. What did Lasher think?

Last night, before he’d left Oak Haven, Aaron had said, “It was the man. I saw him in the headlights. I knew it was a trick, but I couldn’t chance it.”

“So what are you going to do?” Michael had asked.

“Be careful,” said Aaron. “What else can I do?”

And now she wanted him to meet her at the house at three o’clock, because she needed some time alone there. With Lasher? How was he going to put a lid on his emotions until three o’clock?

Well, you’re in New Orleans, aren’t you, old buddy? You haven’t been back to the old neighborhood. Maybe it’s time to go.

He left the hotel at eleven forty-five, the engulfing warm air surprising and delighting him as he stepped outside. After thirty years in San Francisco, he had been braced for the chill and the wind reflexively.

And as he walked in the direction of uptown, he found he had been braced for a hill climb or hill descent in the same subconscious fashion. The flat wide pavements felt wonderful to him. It was as if everything was easier—every breath he took of the warm breeze, every step, the crossing of the street, the gentle looking around at the mature black-barked oaks that changed the cityscape as soon as he had crossed Jackson Avenue. No wind cutting his face, no glare of the Pacific coast sky blinding him.

He chose Philip Street for the walk out to the Irish Channel, and moved slowly as he would have in the old days, knowing the heat would get worse, that his clothes would get heavy, and that even the insides of his shoes would become moist after a little while, and he’d take off this khaki safari jacket sooner or later and sling it over his shoulder.

But he soon forgot about all that; this was the landscape of too many happy memories. It drew him away from worrying about Rowan; it drew him away from worrying about the man; and he was just sliding back into the past, drifting by the old ivy-covered walls, and the young crepe myrtles growing thin and weedy and full of big floppy blossoms. He had to slap them back as he went on. And it came to him again, as strongly as it had before, that longing had embellished nothing. Thank God so much was still here! The tall Queen Anne Victorians, so much larger than those of San Francisco, were still standing right beside the earlier antebellum houses with their masonry walls and columns, as sturdy and magnificent as the house on First Street.

At last, he crossed Magazine, wary of the speeding traffic,
and moved on into the Irish Channel. The houses seemed to shrink; columns gave way to posts; the oaks were no more; even the giant hackberry trees didn’t go beyond the corner of Constance Street. But that was all right, that was just fine. This was his part of town. Or at least it had been.

Annunciation Street broke his heart. The fine renovations and fresh paint jobs he had glimpsed on Constance and Laurel were few and far between on this neglected street. Garbage and old tires littered the empty lots. The double cottage in which he’d grown up was abandoned, with big slabs of weathered plywood covering all its doors and windows; and the yard in which he’d played was now a jungle of weeds, enclosed by an ugly chain-link fence. He saw nothing of the old four o’clocks which had bloomed pink and fragrant summer and winter; and gone were the banana trees by the old shed at the end of the side alley. The little corner grocery was padlocked and deserted. And the old corner bar showed not the slightest sign of life.

Gradually he realized he was the only white man to be seen.

He walked on deeper it seemed into the sadness and the shabbiness. Here and there was a nicely painted house; a pretty black child with braided hair and round quiet eyes clung to the gate, staring up at him. But all the people he might have known were long gone.

And the dreary decay of Jackson Avenue at this point hurt him to see it. Yet on he walked, towards the brick tenements of the St. Thomas Project. No white people lived in there anymore. No one had to tell him that.

This was the black man’s town back here now, and he felt cold appraising eyes on him as he turned down Josephine Street towards the old churches and the old school. More boarded-up wooden cottages; the lower floor of a tenement completely gutted. Ripped and swollen furniture piled at a curb.

In spite of what he had seen before, the decay of the abandoned school buildings shocked him. There was glass broken out from the windows of the rooms in which he’d studied in those long-ago years. And there, the gymnasium he had helped to build appeared so worn, so past its time, so utterly forgotten.

Only the churches of St. Mary’s and St. Alphonsus stood proud and seemingly indestructible. But their doors were locked. And in the sacristy yard of St. Alphonsus, the weeds grew up to his knees. He could see the old electrical boxes open and rusted, the fuses torn out.

“Ya wanna see the church?”

He turned. A small balding man with a rounded belly and a
sweating pink face was talking to him. “Ya can go in the rectory and they’ll take ya in,” the man said.

Michael nodded.

Even the rectory was locked. You had to ring a bell and wait for the buzzer; and the little woman with the thick glasses and the short brown hair spoke through a glass.

He drew out a handful of twenty-dollar bills. “Let me make a donation,” he said. “I’d love to see both churches if I could.”

“You can’t see St. Alphonsus,” she said. “It isn’t used now. It isn’t safe. The plaster’s falling.”

The plaster! He remembered the glorious murals on the ceiling, the saints peering down at him from a blue sky. Under that roof, he had been baptized, made his First Communion, and later Confirmation. And that last night here, he had walked down the aisle of St. Alphonsus in his white cap and gown, with the other high school graduates, not even thinking to take a last slow look around because he was excited to be going with his mother out west.

“Where did they all go?” he asked.

“Moved away,” she said, as she beckoned for him to follow her. She was taking him through the priest house itself into St. Mary’s. “And the colored don’t come.”

“But why is it all locked?”

“We’ve had one robbery after another.”

He couldn’t conceive of it, not being able to wander into a quiet, shadowy church at any hour. Not being able to escape the noisy sun-cooked street, and sit in the dim quiet, talking to the angels and the saints, while old women in flowered dresses and straw hats knelt whispering with dried lips their rosaries.

She led him through the sanctuary. He had been an altar boy here. He had prepared the sacramental wine. He felt a little throb of happiness when he saw the rows and rows of wooden saints, when he saw the long high nave with its successive Gothic arches. All splendid, all intact.

Thank God this was still standing. He was getting choked up. He shoved his hands in his pockets and lowered his head, only looking up slowly under his brows. His memories of Masses here and Masses across the street at St. Alphonsus mingled completely. There had been no German-Irish quarrel by his time, just all the German and Irish names jumbled together. And the grammar school had used the other church for morning Mass. The high school had filled up St. Mary’s.

It took no imagination to see again the uniformed students filing out of the rows to go to Communion. Girls in white blouses and blue wool skirts, boys in their khaki shirts and trousers. But
memory scanned all the years; when he was eight years old he’d swung the smoking incense here, on these steps, for Benediction.

“Take your time,” the little woman said. “Just come back through the rectory when you’re finished.”

For a half hour he sat in the first pew. He did not know precisely what he was doing. Memorizing, perhaps, the details he could not have called forth from his recollections. Never to forget again the names carved in the marble floor of those buried under the altar. Never to forget perhaps the painted angels high above. Or the window far to his right in which the angels and the saints wore wooden shoes! How curious. Could anyone now have explained such a thing? And to think he’d never noticed it before, and when he thought of all those hours spent in this church …