The witching hour

of brilliant green leaves beneath the peeling cornices. Never mind that it was so somber here, so damp.

Even the approach through the deserted streets seduced him. He walked slowly over cracked and uneven sidewalks of herringbone brick or gray flagstone, under an unbroken archway of oak branches, the light eternally dappled, the sky perpetually veiled in green. Always he paused at the largest tree that had lifted the iron fence with its bulbous roots. He could not have gotten his arms around the trunk of it. It reached all the way from the pavement to the house itself, twisted limbs clawing at the shuttered windows beyond the banisters, leaves enmeshed with the flowering vines.

But the decay here troubled him nevertheless. Spiders wove their tiny intricate webs over the iron lace roses. In places the iron had so rusted that it fell away to powder at the touch. And here and there near the railings, the wood of the porches was rotted right through.

Then there was the old swimming pool far beyond the garden-a great long octagon bounded by the flagstones, which had become a swamp unto itself with its black water and wild irises. The smell alone was frightful. Frogs lived there, frogs you could hear at dusk, singing their grinding, ugly song. Sad to see the little fountain jets up one side and down the other still sending their little arching streams into the muck. He longed to drain it, clean it, scrub the sides with his own hands if he had to. Longed to patch the broken balustrade, and rip the weeds from the overgrown urns.

Even the elderly aunts of his patient-Miss Carl, Miss Millie, and Miss Nancy-had an air of staleness and decay. It wasn’t a matter of gray hair or wire-rimmed glasses. It was their manner, and the fragrance of camphor that clung to their clothes.

Once he had wandered into the library and taken a book down from the shelf. Tiny black beetles scurried out of the crevice. Alarmed he had put the book back.

If there had been air-conditioning in the place it might have been different. But the old house was too big for that-or so they had said back then. The ceilings soared fourteen feet overhead. And the sluggish breeze carried with it the scent of mold.

His patient was well cared for, however. That he had to admit. A sweet old black nurse named Viola brought his patient out on the screened porch in the morning and took her in at evening.

“She’s no trouble at all, Doctor. Now, you come on, Miss Deirdre, walk for the doctor.” Viola would lift her out of the chair and push her patiently step by step.

“I’ve been with her seven years now, Doctor, she’s my sweet girl.”

Seven years like that. No wonder the woman’s feet had started to turn in at the ankles, and her arms to draw close to her chest if the nurse didn’t force them down into her lap again.

Viola would walk her round and round the long double parlor, past the harp and the Bosendorfer grand layered with dust. Into the long broad dining room with its faded murals of moss-hung oaks and tilled fields.

Slippered feet shuffling on the worn Aubusson carpet. The woman was forty-one years old, yet she looked both ancient and young-a stooped and pale child, untouched by adult worry or passion. Deirdre, did you ever have a lover? Did you ever dance in that parlor?

On the library bookshelves were leather-bound ledgers with old dates marked on the spines in faded purple ink: 1756, 1757, 1758 … Each bore the family name of Mayfair in gold lettering.

Ah, these old southern families, how he envied them their heritage. It did not have to lead to this decay. And to think, he did not know the full names of his own great-grandparents or where they had been born.

Mayfair-a vintage colonial clan. There were old paintings on the walls of men and women in eighteenth- century dress, as well as daguerreotypes and tintypes and faded photographs. A yellowed map of Saint-Domingue- did they call it that still? – in a dirty frame in the hallway. And a darkening painting of a great plantation house.

And look at the jewels his patient wore. Heirlooms surely, with those antique settings. What did it mean that they put that kind of jewelry on a woman who hadn’t spoken a word or moved of her own volition in over seven years?

The nurse said she never took off the chain with the emerald pendant, not even when she bathed Miss Deirdre.

“Let me tell you a little secret, Doctor, don’t you ever touch that!”

“And why not?” he wanted to ask. But he had said nothing. He watched uneasily as the nurse put on the patient’s ruby earrings, her diamond ring.

Like dressing a corpse, he thought. And out there the dark oaks wind their limbs towards the dusty window screens. And the garden shimmers in the dull heat.

“And look at her hair,” said the nurse lovingly. “Have you ever seen such beautiful hair?”

It was black all right, and thick and curly and long. The nurse loved to brush it, watching the curls roll up as the brush released them. And the patient’s eyes, for all their listless stare, were a clear blue. Yet now and then a thin silver line of saliva fell down from the side of her mouth, making a dark circle on the bosom of her white nightgown.

“It’s a wonder somebody hasn’t tried to steal those things,” he said half to himself. “She’s so helpless.”

The nurse had given him a superior, knowing smile.

“No one who’s ever worked in this house would try that.”

“But she sits all alone on that side porch by the hour. You can see her from the street.”

Laughter.

“Don’t worry about that, Doctor. No one around here is fool enough to come in that gate. Old Ronnie mows the lawn, but that’s because he always did, done it for thirty years now, but then old Ronnie isn’t exactly right in the head.”

“Nevertheless … ” But he had stopped himself. What was he doing, talking like this right in front of the silent woman, whose eyes only now and then moved just a little, whose hands lay just where the nurse had placed them, whose feet rested limply on the bare floor. How easy it was to forget oneself, forget to respect this tragic creature. Nobody knew what the woman understood.

“Might get her out in the sun sometime,” the doctor said. “Her skin is so white.”

But he knew the garden was impossible, even far away from the reek of the pool. The thorny bougainvillea burst in clumps from beneath the wild cherry laurel. Fat little cherubs, streaked with slime, peered out of overgrown lantana like ghosts.

Yet once children had played here.

Some boy or girl had carved the word Lasher into the thick trunk of the giant crepe myrtle that grew against the far fence. The deep gashes had weathered so that they gleamed white against the waxy bark. Strange word that. And a wooden swing was still hanging from the branch of the distant oak.

He’d walked back to that lonely tree, and sat down on the swing for a moment, felt the rusted chains creak, then move as he pushed his foot into the crushed grass.

The southern flank of the house looked mammoth and overwhelmingly beautiful to him from this perspective, the flowering vines climbing together all the way up past the green shuttered windows to the twin chimneys above the third floor. The dark bamboo rattled in the breeze against the plastered masonry. The glossy banana trees grew so high and dense they made a jungle clear back to the brick wall.

It was like his patient, this old place-beautiful yet forgotten by time, by urgency.

Her face might be pretty still if it were not so utterly lifeless. Did she see the delicate purple clusters of wisteria, shivering against the screens, the writhing tangle of other blooms? Could she see all the way through the trees to the white columned house across the street?

Once he had ridden upstairs with her and her nurse in the quaint yet powerful little elevator with its brass gate and worn carpet. No change in Deirdre’s expression as the little car began to rise. It made him anxious to hear the churning machinery. He could not imagine the motor except as something blackened and sticky and ancient, coated with dust.

Of course he had questioned the old doctor at the sanitarium.

“I remember when I was your age,” said the old doctor. “I was going to cure all of them. I was going to reason with the paranoiacs, and bring the schizophrenics back to reality, and make the catatonics wake up. You give her that shot every day, son. There’s nothing there anymore. We just do our best to keep her from getting worked up now and then, you know, the agitation.

Agitation? That was the reason for these powerful drugs? Even if the shots were stopped tomorrow it would be a month before the effects had fully worn off. And the levels used were so high they might have killed another