Soft and leafy as Paradise, the Garden District.
The traffic waited until she reached the curb, and then with a loud swoosh it moved on behind her. Yes, take to the street. And even here was the litter of Mardi Gras. What a shame, for shame.
Why doesn’t everyone come out and sweep the banquette? She felt sad suddenly that she had not done this herself this morning as was her plan. She had meant to go out. She liked to sweep. It took her forever. And Alicia would call down to her, “Come inside!” but she swept and swept.
“Miss Ancient Evelyn, you’ve been sweeping out here for hours,” Patricia would say.
But of course, why not? Will the leaves ever stop falling? Why, whenever she thought of Mardi Gras coming, all that entered her mind was that it was going to be fun to sweep the banquette after. So much rubble and trash. Sweep and sweep.
Only something this morning had come between her and the broom. What was it?
The Garden District was dead quiet. It really was as if no one had lived here. The noise of the Avenue was so much better. On the Avenue, you were never alone; even late at night the headlamps shone through the windows, and threw a cheery yellow glow into the mirrors. You could go outside in the very cool of the darkest morning, and stand on the corner and see the streetcar drift by, or a man strolling past, or a car creeping along with young men inside laughing and talking to each other, furtive yet happy.
On and on she walked. But they had destroyed the old houses here too, some of them. It was probably true, Mona’s observation, whatever it had been, something to do with architecture. A stunning lack of vision. A clash between science and imagination. “A misunderstanding,” Mona had said, “of the relationship of form and function.” Some forms succeed and some fail. Everything is form. Mona had said that. Mona would have loved Julien.
She came to Third Street now. Halfway there. It was nothing to cross these little streets. There was no traffic at all. No one was awake yet. On she walked, sure of herself on the asphalt that gleamed in the sun, with no evil cracks or crevices to trip her.
Julien, why don’t you come back? Why don’t you help me? Why are you always such a tease? Good God, Julien. I can play the Victrola now in the library. There is no one to stop me, just Michael Curry, that sweet man, and Mona. I can play the Victrola and say your name.
Ah, what a lovely perfume, the ligustrum in bloom. She had forgotten all about it. And there was the house, my Lord, look at the color of it. She had never known it to have much of a color at all, and now it was all bright and grayish violet, with shutters painted in green, and the fence very black against it.
Oh, it
And there, there on the upstairs porch he stood looking down at her. Michael Curry. Yes, that was the man.
He was in his pajamas and very rumpled, robe open in front and he was smoking a cigarette. Like Spencer Tracy he looked, that chunky and Irish and rough, though his hair was black. Nice good-looking man with lots of black hair. And weren’t his eyes blue? Certainly seemed so.
“Hello there, Michael Curry,” she said. “I’ve come to see you. I’ve come to talk to Mona Mayfair.”
Good Lord, what a shock that gave him. How alarmed he was. But she sang it out loud and clear.
“I know Mona’s inside. You tell her to come out.”
And then there was her sleepy girl, in a white gown, all frazzled and yawning the way children do, as if no one is holding them accountable.
Up in the treetops they stood behind the black railing, and it struck her suddenly what had happened, where they had been together. Oh, good Lord, and Gifford had warned her about this, that Mona was “on the path” so to speak, and must be watched, and that child hadn’t been looking for the “Victrola at all, she’d been looking for Mary Beth’s style of Irish boy, Rowan Mayfair’s husband: Michael Curry.
Ancient Evelyn felt a lovely desire to laugh and laugh.
As Stella would have said, “What a scream!”
But Ancient Evelyn was tired and her fingers curled over the black wire of the fence and she was relieved as she bowed her head to hear the big front door open, to hear naked feet slap across the porch, that intimate unmistakable patter, and to see Mona standing there, until she realized what she had to tell Mona.
“What is it, Ancient Evelyn?” she asked. “What’s happened?”
“You didn’t see anything, child? She didn’t call your name? Think, my precious girl, before I tell you. No, it’s not your mother.”
And then Mona’s little-girl face crumpled and became wet with tears, and, opening the gate, she wiped at her eye with the back of her hand.
“Aunt Gifford,” she cried in a wee voice, so fragile and young and so unlike Mona the Strong, and Mona the Genius. “Aunt Gifford! And I had been so glad that she wasn’t here.”
“You didn’t do it, darling child,” she said. “Blood in the sand. Happened this morning. Maybe she didn’t suffer. Maybe she’s in heaven this very minute looking down on us and wondering why we are sad.”
Michael Curry stood at the top of the marble steps, robe properly closed, with slippers on his feet, hands in his pockets, hair even combed.
“Why, that young man isn’t sick,” she said.
Mona broke into sobs, staring helplessly from Ancient Evelyn to the ruddy dark-haired man on the porch.
“Who said he was dying of a bad heart?” asked Ancient Evelyn as she watched him come down the steps. She reached out and clasped the young man’s hand. “There’s nothing wrong with this strapping young man at all!”
Nine
HE HAD ASKED them to gather in the library. The little brown portable gramophone was in the corner and that splendid necklace of long pearls, and the little packet of pictures of Stella and Ancient Evelyn when they had been young together. But he didn’t want to talk about that now. He had to talk about Rowan.
It made Mona happy that these things had been found, very happy, in the middle of her grief for the death of Gifford, but Mona was not his concern. He was suffering agonies over his indiscretion with Mona; well, one minute he was, and the next he had other things to think about. Like that two months had passed, and he had lived in this house like one of its ghosts, and that was over, and he had to search for his wife.
They had just come back from Ryan’s house, from the two hours of drinking and talking after Gifford’s funeral. They had come back to the house-come for this conference, and come merely to be with each other a little longer, crying for Gifford as it was the family custom to do.
All during last night’s wake and the funeral today he had seen the looks of amazement on their faces as they shook his hand, as they told him he looked “so much better,” as they whispered about him to one another. “Look at Michael! Michael’s come back from the dead.”
There was the awful raucous shock of Gifford’s untimely death on the one hand-a perfect wife and mother removed from life, leaving behind a brilliant and beloved lawyer husband and three exquisite children. And then there was the shock that Michael was OK, that the legendary abandoned husband, the latest male victim of the Mayfair legacy, was not actually wasting away. Michael was fine. He was up and dressed and driving his own car in the funeral procession. And he wasn’t short of breath, or dizzy or sick to his stomach.
And he and Dr. Rhodes had fought it out about the drugs in the foyer of the funeral home, and Michael had won. He wasn’t experiencing any bad withdrawal. He had emptied the bottles, and then put them away. Later he would check the labels. He would discover what he had been taking, but not now. The sickness was over. He had work to do.
And there was Mona always in the corner of his eyes, staring at him, and now and then whispering, “I told you so.” Mona with her slightly chubby cheeks and pale pale freckles, and her long rich red hair. No one ever called that kind of redhead a carrot top. People always turned to stare.
And then there was the house. How explain about the house? That the house felt alive again. That the moment he’d wakened in Mona’s arms, he’d known the old awareness-of something unseen, and present, and watching. The house creaked as it had before. It looked as it had before. Then of course there was the entire mystery of the music in the parlor and what he had done with Mona. Had his powers to see the invisible actually
