The Witching Hour (129 page)

Michael was the one who knew such things; his long love affair with Victoriana in all forms stood him well. He could identify the fish knives and the oyster forks and the jelly spoons, and dozens of other tiny special items, of which there were a countless number in a dozen different ornate patterns.

Sterling candlesticks they found, elaborate punch bowls and serving platters, bread plates and butter dishes and old water pitchers, and coffee urns and teapots and carafes. Exquisite chasing. Magically the darkest tarnish gave way to a hard rub of the finger, revealing the old luster of pure silver beneath.

Cut-glass bowls of all sizes were pushed to the back of the cabinets, leaded crystal dishes and plates.

Only the tablecloths and the piles of old napkins were too far gone, the fine linen and lace having rotted in the inevitable damp, the letter M showing proudly still here and there beneath the dark stain of mildew.

Yet even a few of these had been carefully preserved in a dry cedar-lined drawer, wrapped in blue paper. Heavy old lace that had yellowed beautifully. And tumbled among them were napkin rings of bone and silver and gold.

Touch them? Did the MBM stand for Mary Beth Mayfair? And here, here is a ring with the letters JM and you know to whom that must have belonged. He put it back, gloved fingers now as agile as bare fingers, though his hands were hot and uncomfortable, and the cross as she called it was biting into him with its weight.

The late afternoon sun came in long slanting rays through the
dining room windows. Look at her again in this setting. Rowan Mayfair. The murals sprang to life, revealing a whole population of little figures lost in the dreamy plantation fields. The great oblong table stood sturdy and fine as it had perhaps for a century. The Chippendale chairs, with their intricately carved backs, lined the walls.

Shall we dine here together soon with high flickering candles?

“Yes,” she whispered. “Yes!”

Then in the butler’s pantry they found the delicate glassware, enough for a royal banquet. They found thin fine-spun goblets and thick-bottomed tumblers etched with flowers—sherry glasses, glasses for brandy, for champagne, for white wine and red wine, and shot glasses, and dessert glasses, and decanters to go with them, with glass stoppers, and crystal cut-glass pitchers, and pretty dishes again, stacks of them, glimmering in the light.

So many treasures, Michael thought, and all of them waiting it seemed for the touch of a wand to bring them back into service.

“I’m dreaming of parties,” Rowan said, “of parties like in the old days, of bringing them all together, and piling the table with food. Of Mayfairs and Mayfairs.”

Michael gazed in silence at her profile. She held a delicate stem glass in her right hand, letting it catch the fragile sun.

“It’s all so graceful, so seductive,” she said. “I didn’t know life could be the way that it seems here. I didn’t know there were houses like this anywhere in America. How strange it all is. I’ve traveled the whole world, and never been to a place like this. It’s as if time forgot this place completely.”

Michael couldn’t help but smile. “Things change very slowly here,” he said. “Thank God for that.”

“Yet it’s as if I dreamed of these rooms, and of a way of life that can be lived here, and never remembered on waking. But something in me, something in me must have remembered. Something in me felt alien and lost in the world we made out there.”

They wandered out into the sunshine together, roaming around the old pool and through the ruined cabana. “This is all solid,” Michael explained as he examined the sliding doors, and the washbasin and shower. “It can be repaired. Look, this is built of cypress. And the pipes are copper. Nothing destroys cypress. I could fix that plumbing in a couple of days.”

Back into the high grass they walked, where the old outbuildings had once stood. Nothing remained but one lone sad tumbledown
wooden structure on the very inside edge of the rear lot.

“Not so bad, not so bad at all,” Michael said, peering through the dusty screens. “Probably the menservants lived out here, it’s a sort of
garçonniére.
”

Here was the oak tree in which Deirdre had sought refuge, soaring to perhaps eighty feet over their heads. The foliage was dark and dusty and tight with the heat of the summer. It would break into a glorious mint green in the spring. Great clumps of banana trees sprang like monstrous grass in patches of sunlight. And a long beautifully built brick wall stretched across the back of the property, overgrown with ivy and tangled wisteria right to the hinges of the Chestnut Street gates.

“The wisteria is still blooming,” Michael said. “I love these purple blossoms—how I used to love to touch them when I went walking, to see the petals shiver.”

Why the hell can’t you take off the gloves for a moment, just to feel those tender little petals in your hand?

Rowan stood with her eyes closed. Was she listening to the birds? He found himself staring at the long back wing of the main house, at the servants’ porches with their white wooden railings and white privacy lattice, and just the sight of this lattice subdued him and made him feel happy. These were all the random colors and textures of home.

Home. As if he had ever lived in such a place. Well, had any wandering observer ever loved it more? And in a way he had always lived in it, it was the place he had longed for when he went away, the place he had dreamed of … 

You cannot imagine the strength of the assault
 … 

“Michael?”

“What is it, honey?” He kissed her, catching the delicious smell of the sun in her hair. The warmth gave a glisten to her skin. But the frisson of the visions lingered. He opened his eyes wide, letting the burnt afternoon light fill them, letting the soft hum of the insects lull him.

tangle of lies
 … 

Rowan went before him in the high grass.

“There are flagstones here, Michael.” Her voice so thin in the great openness. “All of this is flagstone. It’s covered over.”

He wandered after her, back into the front garden. They found little Greek statues, cement satyrs beautifully weathered, peeping with blind eyes from beneath the overgrown boxwood; a marble nymph lost in the dark waxen leaf camellias, and the tiny yellow lantana blooming beautifully wherever the sun broke in.

“Bacon and eggs, we called this little flower,” he said, picking
a sprig of it for her. “See the tiny brown and yellow petals, mingled with the orange. And there, there’s the blue kind. And see that flower, that’s impatiens, and look, that’s hollyhock—the big blue flowers growing by the porch, but we always called it althaea.”

“Althaea, that’s so lovely.”

“That vine there is the Queen’s Wreath, or the Coral Wreath, but we called it Rose of Montana.”

They could just see the white streak of Deirdre’s old rocking chair above the lace of the vines. “They must have trimmed them for her to see out,” he said. “See how they’ve grown up the other side, fighting the bougainvillea? Ah, but it’s the queen of the wall, isn’t it?”

Almost violent the fluorescent purple bracts that everyone thought were flowers.

“Lord God, how many times did I try to make all this in some little backyard in California, before I turned over the key to the new owner. After I’d hung the Quaker Lace curtains on the windows, and done the floors with Minwax Golden Oak, and found the claw-footed tub from the salvage yard. And here the place looms, the genuine article … ”

“And it’s yours, too,” she said. “Yours and mine.” How innocent she seemed now, how full of eager sincerity her soft smile.

She wound her arm around him again, squeezed his gloved hand with her naked fingers. “But what if it’s all decayed inside, Michael? What would it take to cure everything that’s wrong?”

“Come here, stand back here, and look,” he said. “See the way the servants’ porches run completely straight up there? There’s no weakness in the foundation of this house at all. There are no leaks visible on the first floor, no dampness seeping through. Nothing! And in the old days those porches were the hallways by which the servants came and went. That’s why there are so many floor-length windows and doors, and by the way every window and door I’ve tried is level. And the house is all open on this side to catch the river breeze. All over the city, you’ll see that, houses open on the river side, to catch the river breeze.”

She gazed up at the windows of Julien’s old room. Was she thinking again of Antha?

“I can feel the curse lifting from this place,” she whispered. “That’s what was meant, that you and I should come, and love each other here.”

Yes, I believe mat, he thought, but somehow or other he didn’t say it. Maybe the stillness around him seemed too alive; maybe
he was afraid to challenge something unseen that watched and listened.

“All these walls are solid brick, Rowan,” he went on, “and some of them as much as twenty inches thick. I measured them with my hands when I walked through the various doorways. Twenty inches thick. They’d been plastered over outside to make the house look like stone because that was the fashion. See the scoring in the paint? To make it look like a villa built of great blocks of stone?

“It’s a polyglot,” he confessed, “with its cast-iron lace and Corinthian columns and Doric and Ionic columns, and the keyhole doorways—”

“Yeah, keyholes,” she said. “And I’ll tell you about another place where I saw a doorway like that. It’s on the tomb. At the very top of the Mayfair tomb.”

“How do you mean at the top?”

“Just the carving of a doorway, like the doorways in this house. I’m sure that’s what it was, unless it’s really meant to be a keyhole. I’ll show you. We can walk over there today or tomorrow. It’s right off the main path.”

Why did that fill him with uneasiness? A doorway carved on the tomb? He hated graveyards, he hated tombs. But sooner or later he had to see it, didn’t he? He went on talking, stifling the feeling, wanting to have the moment and the sight of the house before him, bathed in the lovely sun.

“Then there are those curved Italianate windows on the north side,” he said, “and that’s another architectural influence. But it’s all of a piece, finally. It works because it works. It’s built for this climate with its fifteen-foot ceilings. It’s a great trap for light and cool breezes, a citadel against the heat.”

Slipping her arm around him, she followed him back inside and up the long shadowy stairs.

“See, this plaster is firm,” he explained. “It’s almost surely the original, but it was done by master craftsmen. They probably ran those crown moldings by hand. There aren’t even the minimum cracks you’d expect from settlement. When I get under the house I’m going to find these are chain walls that go clear down to the ground, and that the sills that support this house are enormous. They have to be. Everything is level, firm.”

“And I thought it was hopeless when I first saw it.”

“Take this old wallpaper down with your imagination,” he said. “Paint the walls in your mind’s eyes with bright warm colors. See all this woodwork shining white and clean.”

“It’s ours now,” she whispered. “Yours and mine. We’re writing the file from now on.”

“The File on Rowan and Michael,” he said with a faint smile. He paused at the top of the stairs. “Things up here on the second floor are simpler. The ceilings are about a foot lower, and you don’t have the ornate crown moldings. It’s all a smaller scale.”

She laughed and shook her head. “And how high are these smaller rooms, thirteen feet, perhaps?”

They turned and went down the hall to the first bedroom on the very front of the house. Its windows opened both to the front and the side porches. Belle’s prayer book lay on the chest of drawers, with her name engraved in the cover in gold letters. There were photographs in gilt frames behind dim glass hanging on dulled and rusted chains.

“Julien again. Has to be,” said Michael. “And Mary Beth, look, that woman looks like you, Rowan.”

“So they told me,” she said softly.

Belle’s rosary, with her named engraved on the back of the crucifix, lay still on the pillow of the four-poster bed. Dust rose from the feather comforter when Michael touched it. A wreath of roses peered down at him from the satin tester above.

Gloomy it all seemed with its fading flowered paper, and the heavy armoires tilting ever so slightly forward, and the carpet threadbare and the color of dust itself. The branches of the oaks looked like ghosts beyond the pongee curtains. The bathroom was clean and very plain—tile from Stella’s time, Michael figured. A great old tub such as one still finds now and then in old hotels, and a high pedestal lavatory, and stacks of towels, layered with dust, on a wicker stand.

“Oh, but Michael, this is the best room,” Rowan said behind him. “This is the one that opens to the south and the west. Help me with this window.”

They forced the stubborn sash. “It’s like being in a tree house,” she said as she stepped outside on the deep front gallery. She laid her hand on the fluted Corinthian column and looked into the twisted branches of the oaks. “Look, Michael, there are ferns growing in the branches, hundreds of little green ferns. And there, a squirrel. No, there are two of them. We’ve frightened them. This is so strange. It’s like we’re in the woods, and we can jump out there and start climbing. We could just wander heavenward through this tree.”

Michael tested the rafters underneath. “Solid, just like everything else. And the iron lace isn’t rusted, not really. All it needs is paint.” No leaks in the roof above either.

Just waiting, waiting all this time to be restored. He stopped, and slipped off his khaki jacket. The heat was getting to him finally, even here where the river breezes did flood by.

He slung the jacket over his shoulder and held it with one hooked finger.

Rowan stood, with arms folded, leaning on the cast-iron railing. She looked out over the quiet still corner.

He was looking down through the tangle of the little sweet olive trees, at the front gate. He was seeing himself as a boy standing there, just seeing himself so clearly. She clasped his hand suddenly and drew him after her back inside.