feebleminded old woman.”
She had laughed and laughed. “But I am,” she had said, “and the ones I loved to talk to are all gone. Now there’s only Mona. And most of the time, Mona talks to me.”
How he had laughed at that.
Ancient Evelyn had grown up speaking as little as possible. The truth was Ancient Evelyn might never have spoken much to a soul if it hadn’t been for Julien.
And the one thing she did want to do was tell Mona someday all about Julien. Maybe today should be that day. It struck her with a shimmering power! Tell Mona. The Victrola and the pearls are in that house. Mona can have them now.
She stopped before the mirrored hat rack in the alcove. She was satisfied; yes, ready to go out. She had slept all night in her warm gabardine dress and it would be fine in this mild spring weather. She was not rumpled at all. It was so easy to sleep sitting up perfectly straight, with her hands crossed on her knee. She put a handkerchief against the tapestried back of the chair, by her cheek as she turned her head, in case anything came out of her mouth as she slept. But there was rarely a stain upon the cloth. She could use the same handkerchief over and over.
She did not have a hat. But it had been years since she had gone out-except for Rowan Mayfair’s wedding- and she did not know what Alicia had done with her hats. Surely there had been one for the wedding, and if she tried she might recollect what it looked like, probably gray with an old-fashioned little veil. Probably had pink flowers. But maybe she was dreaming. The wedding itself hadn’t seemed very real.
Surely she could not climb the stairs again to look for a hat now, and there were none in her little back room down here. Besides, her hair was done. It was the same soft bouffant she had made of it for years, and she could feel that the coil on the back of her head was firm, pins in place. It made a grand white frame for her face, her hair. She had never regretted its turning white. No, she did not require a hat. As for gloves, there were none now and no one would buy them for her.
At Rowan Mayfair’s wedding, that horrid Lauren Mayfair had even said, “Nobody wears gloves anymore,” as if it didn’t matter. Perhaps Lauren was right.
Ancient Evelyn didn’t mind so terribly about the gloves. She had her brooches and her pins. Her stockings were not wrinkled at all. Her shoes were tied. Mona had tied them yesterday very tight. She was ready to go. She did not look at her face; she never did anymore because it wasn’t her face, it was someone else’s old and wrinkled face, with deep vertical lines, very solemn and cold, and drooping lids, and the skin was too large for the bones underneath, and her eyebrows and her chin had lost their contour.
She would prefer to think about the walk ahead. It made her happy merely to think of it, and that Gifford was gone, and if Ancient Evelyn fell, or was struck down, or became lost, there was no more granddaughter Gifford to become hysterical. It felt wonderful to her suddenly to be free of Gifford’s love-as if a gate had opened wide once more on the world. And Mona would eventually know this too, this relief, this release. But not immediately.
She went down the long, high hall, and opened the front door. It had been a year since she’d gone down the front steps, except for the wedding, and someone had carried her then. There was no rail now to hold to. The banisters had just rotted away years ago and Alicia and Patrick had done nothing about it, except tear them off and throw them under the house.
“My great-grandfather built this house!” she had declared. “He ordered those balusters himself, picked them from the catalogue. And look what you have allowed to happen.” Damn them all.
And damn him too, when she thought about it. How she had hated him, the giant shadow over her childhood, raving Tobias, hissing at her when he snatched up her hand and held it: “Witch, witch’s mark, look at it.” Pinching that tiny sixth finger. She had never answered him, only loathed him in silence. She had never spoken one word to him all of his life.
But a house falling to ruin, that was something more important than whether you hated the person who built it. Why, building this house was maybe the only good thing Tobias Mayfair had ever done. Fontevrault, their once beautiful plantation, had died out in the swampland, or so she had been told every time she asked to be taken to see it. “That old house? The Bayou flooded it!” But then maybe they were lying. What if she could walk all the way to Fontevrault, and find the house standing there.
That was a dream surely. But Amelia Street stood mighty and beautiful on its corner on the Avenue. And something ought to be done, be done, be done…
Banister or no banister, she could manage perfectly well with her cane, especially now that she could see so clearly. She took the steps easily. And went directly down the path and opened the iron picket gate. Imagine. She was walking away from the house for the first time in all these years.
Squinting at the glimmer of traffic in the distance, she crossed the lakeside of the Avenue at once. She had to wait a moment on the riverside, but soon her chance came.
She had always liked the riverside as they called it. And she knew that Patrick was in the restaurant on the corner, drinking and eating his breakfast as he always did.
She crossed Amelia Street and the tiny street called Antonine which came in there only a few feet from Amelia, and she stood on the corner and looked through the glass windows of the restaurant. There was Patrick- scrawny and pale-at the end table, as always, with his beer and his eggs, and the newspaper. He did not even see her. He would stay there, drinking beer and reading the paper for half the day, and then go downtown for a little while perhaps and drink some more in a bar he liked in the Quarter. In the late afternoon, Alicia might wake up and call Patrick at the bar and begin to scream for him to come home.
So he was there, and he did not see her. How could he? Would he ever have expected Ancient Evelyn to leave the house of her own accord?
That was perfectly fine, exactly what she wanted. And on she walked down the block, unseen, unstopped, towards downtown.
How clear were the black-barked oaks, and the beaten down grass of the tree parks. She saw the clutter and trash of Mardi Gras still piled everywhere in the gutters, and in the trash cans which were never enough to contain it.
She walked on, past the drab shabby portable bathrooms they brought out now for Mardi Gras Day, catching the wretched smell of all that filth, and on and on to Louisiana Avenue. Litter everywhere she looked, and from the high branches of the trees hung Mardi Gras necklaces of plastic beads, the kind they threw now, glittering in the sunlight. There was nothing so sorry in the world ever, she thought, as St. Charles Avenue after Mardi Gras Day.
She waited for the stoplight to change. An old colored woman, very properly dressed, waited there also. “Good morning, Patricia,” she said to the woman, and the woman gave a start beneath her black straw hat.
“Why, Miss Ancient Evelyn. What are you doing all the way down here?”
“I’m walking down to the Garden District. I will be fine, Patricia. I have my cane. I wish I had my gloves and my hat, but I do not.”
“That’s a shame, Miss Ancient Evelyn,” said the old woman, very proper, her voice soft and mellow. She was a sweet old thing, Patricia, came by all the time with her little grandchild, who could have passed for white, but didn’t, obviously, or maybe had yet to figure it all out.
Something terribly exciting had happened.
“Oh, I’ll be all right,” Ancient Evelyn said. “My niece is up there, in the Garden District. I have to give her the Victrola.” And then she realized that Patricia knew nothing about these things! That Patricia had stopped many a time at the gate to speak, but she did not know the whole story. How could she? Ancient Evelyn had thought for a moment she was speaking to someone who knew.
Patricia was still talking, but Ancient Evelyn didn’t hear the words. The light was green. She had to cross.
And off she went as rapidly as she could, skirting the raised strip of concrete that divided the street, because stepping up and stepping down would be needlessly hard for her.
She was too slow for the light of course, that had been true twenty years ago, when she still made this walk all the time to pass the First Street house and look at poor Deirdre.
All the young ones of that generation doomed, she thought-sacrificed, as it were, to the viciousness and stupidity of Carlotta Mayfair. Carlotta Mayfair drugged and killed her niece Deirdre. But why think of it now?
It seemed Ancient Evelyn was plagued with a thousand confusing thoughts.
