can do it. Take it uptown, my darling. If I could be a gentleman and carry the whole load for you up to your attic, you can be sure I would. Now, here, when you get to the Avenue, flag a taxi. Give him this. Let him carry the thing inside.”
And there she was singing that song, singing along with the big music box, while carrying the little one out of the house.
Out she had walked, like an altar boy in a procession, carrying the precious thing.
She’d carried it until her arms ached so much she couldn’t go any further. Had to set down the burden on the corner of Prytania and Fourth Street, and sit there on the curb with her elbows on her knees and rest for a while. Traffic whizzing by. Finally she had stopped a taxi, though she had never done such a thing before, and when she got home, the man had brought the Victrola all the way up to the attic for the five dollars Julien had given her. “Thank you, ma’am!”
The darkest of days had been right after his death, when Mary Beth had come to ask if she had “anything of Julien’s,” if she had taken anything from his room. She had shaken her head, refusing as always to answer. Mary Beth had known she was lying. “What did Julien give you?” she asked.
Evelyn had sat on the floor of her attic room, her back to the armoire, which was locked, with the Victrola inside, refusing to answer. Julien is dead, that was all she could think, Julien is dead.
She hadn’t even known then about the child inside her, about Laura Lee, poor doomed Laura Lee. At night, she walked the streets in silence, burning for Julien, and dared not play the Victrola while any light burned in the big Amelia Street house at all.
Years later, when Stella died, it was as if the old wound opened, and they became one-the loss of her two brilliant loves, the loss of the only warm light which had ever penetrated her life’s mysteries, the loss of the music, the loss of all fire.
“Don’t try to make her talk,” her great-grandfather had said to Mary Beth. “You go out of here. You go back up to your house. You leave us alone. We don’t want you here. If there is anything of that abominable man in this house, I’ll destroy it.”
Oh, such a cruel cruel man. He would have killed Laura Lee if he could have. “Witches!” Once he’d taken a kitchen knife and threatened to cut the little extra finger off Evelyn’s hand. How she’d screamed. The others had to stop him-Pearl, and Aurora, and all the old ones from Fontevrault who’d still been there.
But Tobias had been the worst of them, as well as the eldest. How he hated Julien, and all over the gunshot in 1843, when Julien had shot his father, Augustin, at Riverbend, Julien no more than a boy, Augustin a young man, and Tobias, the terrified witness, only a baby still in dresses. That’s the way they dressed boys then, in dresses. “I saw my father fall over dead at my feet!”
“I never meant to kill him,” Julien had told Evelyn as they lay in bed. “I never meant for one whole branch of the family to veer off in bitterness and rage, and everyone else has been trying to get them back ever since, but somehow there are two camps. There is here, and there is Amelia Street. I feel so sorry when I think of all that. I was just a boy, and the fool didn’t know how to run the plantation. I have no compunction about shooting people, you understand, only that time I didn’t plan it, honestly I did not. I did not mean to kill your great-great-grandfather. It was all just the most blundering mistake.”
She had not cared. She hated Tobias. She hated all of them. Old men.
Yet it was with an old man that love had first touched her, in Julien’s attic.
And then there were those nights when she had walked downtown in the dark to that house, climbed the wall, and gone up, hand over hand on the trellis. So easy to climb so high, to swing out and stare down at the flags.
The flags on which poor Antha died. But that had been yet to come, all that, those horrible deaths-Stella, Antha.
It would always be pleasant to remember the thick green vine and the softness of it under her slipper as she climbed.
“Ah,
“Never,” she whispered. Safe in his arms.
Even Richard Llewellyn, that boy he kept, didn’t come between them. Richard knew to knock on Julien’s door, and one was never sure what Richard Llewellyn knew, really. Years ago Richard Llewellyn had talked to that last Talamasca man, though Evelyn had warned him not to. Richard had come up to see her the next day.
“Well, you didn’t tell him about me, did you?” Ancient Evelyn had demanded. Richard was so old. He didn’t have very long.
“No, I didn’t tell him that story. I didn’t want him to think-”
“What? That Julien would bed a girl my age?” She had laughed. “You shouldn’t have talked to that man at all.” Richard hadn’t lasted out the year, and when he died, they gave her his old records. He must have known about the Victrola, why else would he have left those old records to her?
Evelyn should have given Mona the little Victrola a long time ago, and not with such ceremony in front of the other two, her idiot granddaughters, Alicia and Gifford. Leave it to Gifford to confiscate everything-the music box itself and the beautiful necklace.
“You dare!”
Leave it to Gifford to have made the very wrong choice, leave it to Gifford to misunderstand. To gasp in horror when Ancient Evelyn had said the poem. “Why would he want you to have this? What did he think it could do? He was a witch and you know it. A witch as surely as the others.”
And then the terrible confession from Gifford, that she had gone and taken those things and hidden them back up at First Street, in that house whence they’d come.
“You little fool, how could you do such a thing?” Ancient Evelyn had asked. “Mona should have had it! Mona is his great-granddaughter! Gifford, not back to that house where Carlotta will find it, where it will be destroyed.”
She remembered suddenly. Gifford had died this morning!
She was walking on St. Charles Avenue, going up to First Street, and her aggravating, annoying, grating, nerve-wracking grandchild was dead!
“Why didn’t I know it? Julien, why didn’t you come to tell me!”
Well over half a century ago, she’d heard Julien’s voice an hour before his death. She’d heard him calling from beneath her window. She’d sprung up and opened it wide to the rain, and there was Julien down there, only at once she knew it wasn’t really Julien. She’d been terrified he was already dead. He had waved at her, so cheerful and gay, with a big dark mare beside him.
And then she had gone to him, running all the way those ten blocks downtown, and climbed the trellis, and for those precious moments seen his eyes-the life still in them-fixed on her. Oh, Julien, I heard you calling me. I saw you. I saw the embodiment of your love. She had raised the window. She had lifted him.
“Eve,” he had whispered. “Evie, I want to sit up. Evie, help me, I’m dying, Evie! It’s happening, it’s come!”
They had never known she was there.
She’d crouched outside on the porch roof in the fury of the storm, listening to them. They’d never thought to even look outside as they closed the window and laid him out, and sent for everyone. And there she’d been huddled against the chimney, watching the lightning and thinking, Why don’t you strike me? Why don’t I die? Julien is dead.
“What did he give you?” Mary Beth had asked her every time she saw her. Year after year she came.
Mary Beth had stared at little Laura Lee, such a weak, thin baby, never a baby that people wanted to hold. Mary Beth had always known that Julien had been Laura Lee’s father.
And how the others had hated her. “Julien’s spawn, look at her, with the witch’s mark on her hand, look, like you!”
It wasn’t so bad, just a tiny extra finger. Why, most people had never noticed it, though Laura Lee had been so self-conscious, and no one at Sacred Heart knew what it meant.
“The mark of the witch,” Tobias used to say. “There are many. Red hair is the worst, and a sixth finger the second, and a monster’s height, the third. And you with the sixth finger. Go live up at First Street, live with the damned who gave you your talents. Get out of my house.”
Of course she had never gone, not with Carlotta there! Better to ignore the old men as she and her little
