Page 31

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.

Cortland, Julien's beloved son, dead from a fall down the steps--that was all Carlotta's fault, too, wasn't it? They'd brought him into Touro only two blocks away. Ancient Evelyn had been sitting on the porch. She could see the top of the brick walls of the hospital from her very chair, and what a shock it had been to learn that Cortland had died there, only two blocks away, talking to strangers in the emergency room.

And to think that Cortland had been Ancient Evelyn's father. Ah, well, that had never mattered, not really. Julien had mattered, yes, and Stella, but fathers and mothers, no.

Barbara Ann had died giving birth to Ancient Evelyn. That was no mother, really. Only a cameo, a silhouette, a portrait in oils. "See? That's your mother." A trunk full of old clothes, and a rosary and some unfinished embroidery that might have been for a sachet.

How Ancient Evelyn's mind wandered. But she had been counting murders, hadn't she? The murders committed by Carlotta Mayfair who was now dead, thank God, and gone.

The murder of Stella, that had been the worst of them all. That Carlotta had most definitely done. Surely that had to be laid on Carlotta's conscience. And in the rosy days of 1914, Evelyn and Julien had known such terrible things were coming, but there had been nothing either of them could do.

For one brief instant, Ancient Evelyn saw the words of the poem again, same way she had seen them on that long-ago day when she had recited them aloud to Julien in his attic bedroom. "I see it. I do not know what it means."

Pain and suffering as they stumble

Blood and fear before they learn.

Woe betide this Springtime Eden

Now the vale of those who mourn.

Ah, what a day this was. So much was coming back to her, and yet the present itself was so fresh and sweet. The breeze so good to her.

On and on, Ancient Evelyn walked.

Here was the vacant lot at Toledano. Would they never build anything else there, and look at these apartment buildings, so plain, so ugly, where once glorious mansions had stood, houses grander than her own. Oh, to think of all those people gone since the days when she took Gifford and Alicia downtown, or the other way to the park, walking between them. But the Avenue did keep its beauty. The streetcar rattled into view even as she spoke, and then roared round the bend--the Avenue was one endless curve, just as it had been all of Ancient Evelyn's life from the time she rode it to go up to First Street. Of course she could not step up on the streetcar now. That was out of the question.

She could not now remember when she stopped riding the car, except that it was decades ago. She'd nearly fallen one night when she was coming home, and dropped her sacks from Marks Isaacs and Maison Blanche and the conductor himself had had to come and help her up. Very embarrassing and upsetting to her it had been. Silent as usual, she had given the conductor her special nod, and touched his hand.

Then the car had rushed away, in a sweep of wind, and she'd been left alone on the neutral ground, and the oncoming traffic had seemed endless and impossible to defeat--the big house in another world on the other side of the street.

"And would you have believed it then if they'd told you you'd live to see another twenty years, to see Deirdre buried and dead, to see poor Gifford dead?"

She had thought sure she'd die the year that Stella died. And then when Laura Lee died it was the same way. Her only daughter. She thought if she stopped talking, death could come and take her.

But it hadn't happened. Alicia and Gifford had needed her. Then Alicia had married. And Mona needed her. Mona's birth had given Ancient Evelyn a new voice.

Oh, she didn't want to be considering things in such a perspective. Not on such a lovely morning. She did try to speak to people. It was simply so unnatural a thing for her to do.

She'd hear the others speaking to her, or more truly she saw their lips move and she knew they wanted her attention. But she could stay in her dreams, walking through the streets of Rome with her arm around Stella's waist, or lying with her in the little room at the hotel, and kissing so gently and endlessly in the shadows, just woman and woman, her breasts pressed softly against Stella's.

Oh, that had been the richest time. Thank God she had not known how pale it would all be...after. She would only know the wide world once, really, and with Stella, and when Stella died, the world did too.

Which had been the greatest love of her prime? Julien in the locked room or Stella of the great adventures? She could not make up her mind.

One thing was true. It was Julien who haunted her, Julien she saw in her waking dreams, Julien's voice she heard. There was a time when she was sure Julien was going to come right up the front steps the way he had when she was thirteen, pushing her great-grandfather out of the way. "Let that girl out, you bloody fool!" And she in the attic had shivered in fear. Julien come to take me away. It would make sense, wouldn't it? Julien hovering about her still. "Crank the Victrola, Evelyn. Say my name."

Stella was more abruptly and totally gone with her tragic death, vanished into a sweet and agonizing grief, as though she had with her last breath truly ascended into heaven. Surely Stella went to heaven. How could anyone who made so many people happy go to hell? Poor Stella. She had never been a real witch, only a child. Maybe gentle souls like Stella did not want to haunt you; maybe they found the light quickly and far better things to do. Stella was memories, yes, but never a ghost.

In the hotel room in Rome, Stella had put her hand between Evelyn's legs, and said, "No, don't be frightened. Let me touch you. Yes, let me see you." Parting Evelyn's legs. "Don't be ashamed. Don't be afraid, with a woman there is never any cause to be afraid. You should know that. Besides, wasn't Oncle Julien gentle?"

"If only we could shut the blinds," E

velyn had pleaded. "It's the light, it's the noise from the piazza. I don't know." But in fact, her body had been stirring and she wanted Stella. It had only just struck her that she could touch Stella all over with her own hands, that she could suckle Stella's breasts and let Stella's weight fall down on her. How she loved Stella. She could have drowned in Stella.

And in a true and deep way Ancient Evelyn's life had ended on that night when Stella was shot in 1929.

She had seen Stella fall on the living room floor and that man from the Talamasca, that Arthur Langtry, run to take the gun from Lionel Mayfair's hand. That man from the Talamasca had died at sea only a little while after. Poor fool, she thought. And Stella had hoped to escape with him, to run off to Europe and leave Lasher with her child. Oh, Stella, to think that such a thing could be done, how foolish and terrible. Ancient Evelyn had tried to warn Stella about those men from Europe who kept their secret books and charts; she'd tried to explain that Stella must not talk to them. Carlotta knew, Evelyn had to give her that, though for all the wrong reasons.