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It was an absolute delight to rise up and order him out of the room.
Also I wanted to walk around again. I was never one for simply lying there, and this had been my worst hour, and it had ended and I was living still.
Richard helped me dress and I went down all the way to the first floor for supper with my family. I sat at the head of the table and made a great show of polishing off gumbo, roast chicken, and a boeuf daube or some other foolishness, just so they would leave me alone. I refused to look at Cortland, who tried again and again to speak to me. I was really making him miserable, my poor fair-haired boy!
The cousins gabbled. Mary Beth spoke of practical things with her drunken husband, Daniel McIntyre, poor old soul, now so sick he was a slovenly ruin of the fine man he'd once been. That's what we did to him, I thought. Richard, my devoted one, kept his eyes on me, and then Stella said--Stella said that we should all go driving, since I was up again, and all right.
Driving, an escapade! The car was all fixed. Oh? I hadn't known it was broken. Well, Cortland took it out...Shut up, Stella, it's fixed, mon pere, it's fixed!
"I am worried about that girl!" I declared. "Evelyn, my granddaughter!"
Cortland hastened to assure me she was taken care of. She'd been taken downtown to buy clothes.
"You Mayfairs think that's the answer to everything, don't you?" asked I. "Go downtown and buy new clothes."
"Well, you're the one who taught us, Father," said Cortland with a little twinkle in his eye.
I was amazed at my cowardice. How I gave in when I saw that affectionate little smile. How I gave in.
"All right, make the car ready, and all of you get out," I said. "Stella and Lionel, we'll go, the three of us, an escapade, you can believe it. All of you go. Carlotta, stay."
She didn't require coaxing. In a moment the vast dining room was still and the murals seemed as always to be closing in on us, ready to transport us out from under the plaster moldings and far away to the verdant fields of Riverbend which they so charmingly rendered. Riverbend, which by this time was gone.
"Did she tell you the poem?" I said to Carlotta.
Carlotta nodded. And very slowly, taking her time, she recited each verse as I remembered it.
"I have told it to Mother," she said. This shocked me. "Lot of good that it did. What did you think would happen?" she demanded. "Did you think you could all dance with the Devil and not pay the price?"
"But I never knew for sure that he was the Devil. There was no God and Devil at Riverbend when I was born. I did the best with what I had."
"You will burn in hell," she said.
A bit of terror went through me.
I wanted to answer, to say so much more...I wanted to tell her all, or all of what there was, but she had risen from the table, thrown down her napkin as if it were a glove, and gone out.
Ah, so she told it to Mary Beth. When Mary Beth came to fetch me, I whispered those dreaded words:
"Slay the flesh that is not human..."
"Ah, now, darling, don't fuss, please," she said. "Go out and have a good time."
When I came out onto the front gallery, the Stutz Bearcat was cooking and ready, and off we went, I and my little ones, Stella and Lionel. We drove past Amelia Street, but we did not stop to see to Evelyn, for we feared we would do more harm than good.
It was to Storyville, to the houses of my favorite ladies, that we went.
I think it was dawn when we came home. I remember now that night as distinctly as all else because it was my last in Storyville, listening to the jazz bands, and singing, and taking the children with me right into the fancy parlors of the brothels. Oh, how shocked were my lady friends! But there is nothing in a brothel that cannot be bought.
Stella loved it! This was living, cried Stella, this was life. Stella drank glass after glass of champagne and danced on her tiptoes. Lionel wasn't so certain. But it didn't matter. I was dying! As I sat in the cram-packed parlor of Lulu White's house, listening to the ragtime piano, I thought, I am dying. Dying! And I was as self-centered about it as anyone else. The world shrank and revolved around Julien. Julien knew a storm was coming. And he could not be there to help! Julien knew all pleasure, adventure and triumph were over! Julien was going to be placed in the tomb like everyone else.
That morning when we arrived home, I kissed my Stella. I told her that it had been a grand occasion, and then I retired to the attic, certain that I would never leave it again.
I lay in the dark night after night, thinking. What if somehow I could come back? What if somehow I could stay earthbound as this thing has done?
After all, if it is Ashlar, one of the many Ashlars, a saint, a king, the vengeful ghost, a mere human--! The dark made noises back to me. The bed trembled. I thought of that verse again...the flesh that isn't human.
"Have you come to trouble me or content me?" I asked.
"Die in peace, Julien," he said. "I would have given you my secrets the first day I came with you to this house. I told you then that such a place could draw you out of eternity, that it was as the castles of old. Remember its patterns, Julien, its graceful battlements. And through the mist you will see them, distinct. But you would not have my lessons then. Will you have them now? I know you. You are alive. You didn't want to hear about death."
"I don't think you know about death," I said. "I think you know about wanting, and haunting, and living! But not death."
I got out of bed. I cranked up the Victrola just to drive the thing away from me. "Yes, I want to come back," I whispered. "I want to come back. I want to remain earthbound, to stay, to be part of this house. But God, I swear it, in my soul of souls, it is not greed to live again, it is that the tale is unfinished, the daemon continues, and I die! I would help, I would be an angel of the Lord somehow. Oh, God, I do not believe in you. I do not believe in anything but Lasher and myself."
I started pacing. I paced and paced and played the waltz of Violetta, a song that seemed utterly oblivious to every kind of sorrow, something so frivolous yet so organized that I found it irresistible.
Then a moment came, so unusual as perhaps to have been unique. In all my long life, I had never been so caught off guard as I was at this moment, and it was by the face of a small girl at my window, a waif of a child crouched upon the high porch roof.
At once I opened the stubborn sash.
"Eve a Lynn," I said. And perfumed, and soft, and wet from the spring rain, she came into my arms.
"How did you come to me, darling?" I asked her.
"Up the trellis, Oncle Julien, hand over hand. You have shown me an attic is not a prison. I will come to you as long as I can."
We made love; we talked together. I lay there with her as the sun came up. She told me they were being kind to her now, letting her go places, that she walked in the evening all the way up the Avenue, and down to Canal Street, that she had ridden in a car again, that she had real shoes. Richard had bought her pretty dresses. Cortland had bought her a coat with fur on the collar. Mary Beth even had given her a silver-backed mirror and a silver-handled comb.
At dawn I sat up and cranked the Victrola. We danced to the waltz. It was a crazy morning, the kind of crazy morning that follows carousing and drunkenness and wandering from dance halls to taverns, yet it had all taken place in this room. She wore only her petticoat then, trimmed in pink lace, and a ribbon in her hair. We danced and danced about the room, giggling, laughing, until finally someone...ah yes, Mary Beth, opened the door.
I only smiled. I knew my angelic child would visit me again.
In the dark of the night, I talked to the Victrola.
I told it to hold the spell. Of course I did not believe in these things. I had steadfastly refused to believe in them. Yet now I pared my nails and slipped them in between the bottom wood and the side wood. I clipped my hair, and slipped that beneath the turntable. I bit my fingers and drew blood and smeared it into the dark stain. I made the thing like a doll of myself, like the witche
s' dolls, and I sang the waltz.
I played the waltz and said, "Come back, come back. Be at hand if they need you. Be at hand if they call you. Come back, come back."
I was possessed of a terrible vision, that I was dead and rising and the light was coming, and that I turned my back on it, and plummeted with my arms out, digging deep into an air which became thicker and thicker, as dense as it was dark. Earthbound. And it seemed the night was choked with spirits like mine, lost souls, fools, fearing hell, and not believing in Paradise. And the waltz played on.
I saw finally the futility of all these gestures, that witchcraft is but a matter of focus--that one can apply one's fierce and immeasurable energies to an act of choice. I would come back! I would come back. I sang it out to the walls.
Come back.
Beware the watchers in that hour!
