The Witching Hour

  "Imagine a daughter being cold to a mother who was dying like that. But Mary Beth took no notice of it. She just lay there, in pain, half dreaming, Stella said, not knowing where she was, sometimes talking out loud to Julien as if she could see him in the room, and of course Stella was by her night and day, you can be sure of that; how Mary Beth loved Stella.

  "Why, Mary Beth told me once that she could put all her other children in a sack and throw them in the Mississippi River, for all she cared. Stella was the only one that mattered. 'Course she was joking. She was never mean to those children. I remember how she used to read by the hour to Lionel when he was little, and help him with his schooling. She got him the best teachers when he didn't want to go to school. None of the children did well in school, except for Carlotta, naturally. Stella was expelled from three different schools, I believe. Carlotta was the only one who really did well, and a lot of good it did her.

  "But what was I saying? Oh, yes. Sometimes I felt I had no place in the house. Whatever the case, I went out. I went to the Quarter. It was the days of Storyville, you know, when prostitution was legal here, and Julien had taken me down to Lulu White's Mahogany Hall himself one night and to the other fashionable places, and he didn't much care if I went on my own.

  "Well, I said I was going that night. And Julien didn't mind. He was up there snug in the third-floor bedroom with his books and his hot chocolate, and his Victrola. Besides, he knew I was only looking. And so I went down there, strolling past all those little houses--you know, the cribs they used to call them--with the girls in the front doors beckoning for me to come in, and of course I had not the slightest intention of doing it.

  "Then my eyes fell on this beautiful young man, I mean a simply beautiful young man. And he stood in one of the alleyways down there, with his arms folded, leaning against the side of the house, simply looking at me. 'Bon soir, Richard,' he said to me and I recognized the voice at once, the French accent. It was Julien's. And I saw that the man was Julien! Only he couldn't have been past twenty! I tell you I never had such a start. I almost cried out. It was worse than seeing a ghost. And the fellow was gone, like that, vanished.

  "I couldn't get to a cab fast enough and I went right straight home to First Street. Julien opened the front door for me. He was wearing his robe, and puffing on his obnoxious pipe and laughing. 'I told you I would show you what I looked like when I was twenty!' he said. He laughed and laughed.

  "I remember I followed him into the parlor. And it was such a lovely room, then, nothing like it is now, you should have seen it. Absolutely lovely French pieces, mostly Louis Cinque, which Julien had bought himself in Europe when he went with Mary Beth. So light and elegant and simply lovely. That art deco furniture was all Stella's doing. She thought it was quite the thing, what with potted palms everywhere! The only good piece of furniture was that Bozendorfer piano. The place looked perfectly mad when I went up there for the funeral, and you know of course that Stella was buried from the house. No funeral parlor for Stella. Why, Stella was laid out in the very front room in which she'd been shot, do you know that? I kept looking around, wondering where exactly it had happened. And don't you know everybody else was doing that, and they had already locked up Lionel, of course. Oh, I couldn't believe it. Lionel had been such a sweet boy, and so good-looking. And he and Stella used to go everywhere together. But what was I saying?

  "Oh, yes, that incredible night. I'd just seen young Julien downtown, beautiful young Julien, speaking French to me, and then I was home again and following old Julien into the parlor and he sat down on the couch there, and stretched out his legs and said, 'Ah, Richard, there are so many things I could tell you, so many things I could show you. But I'm old now. And what's the point? One very fine consolation of old age is you don't need to be understood anymore. A sort of resignation sets in with the inevitable hardening of the arteries.'

  "Of course I was still upset. 'Julien,' I said. 'I demand to know how you did it.' He wouldn't answer me. It was as if I wasn't there. He was staring at the fire. He always had both fires going in that room in winter. It has two fireplaces, you know, and one is slightly smaller than the other.

  "A little later he waked from his dream and he reminded me that he was writing his life story. I might read that after his death, perhaps. He wasn't sure.

  " 'I have enjoyed my life,' he said. 'Perhaps a person shouldn't enjoy his life as much as I have enjoyed mine. Ah, there is so much misery in the world and I have always had such a splendid time! Seems unfair, doesn't it? I should have done more for others, much more. I should have been more inventive! But all of that is in my book. You can read it later.'

  "He said more than once that he was writing his life story. He really had quite an interesting life, you know, being born so long before the Civil War, and seeing so very much. I used to ride with him uptown, and we would ride through Audubon Park and he would talk about the days when all that land had been a plantation. He talked about taking the steamboat from Riverbend. He talked about the old opera house and the quadroon balls. On and on, he talked. I should have written it down. He used to tell little Lionel and Stella those stories too, and how they both listened. He'd take them downtown in the carriage with us, and he would point out places in the French Quarter to them, and tell them wonderful little tales.

  "I tell you I wanted to read that life story. I remember several occasions on which I came into the library and he was writing away, and remarked that it was the autobiography. He wrote by hand, though he did have a typewriter. And he didn't mind at all that the children were underfoot. Lionel would be in there reading by the fire, or Stella would be playing with her doll on the couch, didn't matter one bit, he would just be writing away on his autobiography.

  "And what do you think? When he died, there was no life story. That's what Mary Beth told me. I begged her to let me see whatever he'd written. She said offhandedly there was nothing. She would not let me touch anything on his desk. She locked me out of the library. Oh, I hated her for it, positively hated her. And she did it in such an offhanded way. She would have convinced anybody else she was telling the truth, that's how sure of herself she was. But I had seen the manuscript. She did give me something which belonged to him, and I've always been grateful."

  At that point Llewellyn produced a beautiful carbuncle ring and showed it to me. I complimented him on it, and told him I was curious about the days of Storyville. What had it been like to go there with Julien? His answer was quite lengthy:

  "Oh, Julien loved Storyville, he really did. And the women at Lulu White's Hall of Mirrors adored him, I can tell you. They waited on him as if he were a king. Same thing everywhere he went. Lots of things happened down there, however, that I don't much like to talk about. It wasn't that I was jealous of Julien. It was very simply shocking to a clean-living Yankee boy such as I had been." Llewellyn laughed. "But you'll understand better what I mean if I tell you.

  "The first time Julien took me it was winter, and he had his coachman drive us up to the front doors of one of the best houses. There was a pianist playing there then--I'm not sure who it was now, maybe Manuel Perez, maybe Jelly Roll Morton--I was never the fan of jazz and ragtime that Julien was. He just loved that pianist--they always called those pianists the professor, you know--and we sat in the parlor listening, and drinking champagne, and it was quite good champagne, and of course the girls came in with all their tawdry finery and foolish airs--there was the Duchess this and the Countess that--and they tried to seduce Julien, and he was just perfectly charming to all of them. Then finally he made his choice and it was this older woman, rather plain, and that puzzled me, and he said we were both going upstairs. Of course I didn't want to be with her; nothing could have persuaded me to be with her, but Julien only smiled at that, and said that I should watch and that way I'd learn something of the world. Very typical Julien.

  "And what do you think happened when we went into the bedroom? Well, it wasn't the woman Julien was interested in, it w
as her two daughters, nine and eleven years old. They sort of helped with preparations--the examination of Julien, to put it delicately, to make certain that he didn't have you know ... and then the washing. I tell you I was stunned to watch those children perform these intimate duties, and do you know that when Julien went to it with the mother, the two little girls were there on the bed? They were both very pretty, one with dark hair, the other with blond curls. They wore little chemises, and dark stockings, if you can imagine, and they were enticing, I think even to me. Why, you could see their little nipples through the chemises. Didn't have hardly any breasts at all. I don't know why that was so enticing. They sat against the high carved back of the bed--you know, it was one of those machine-made atrocities that went clear to the ceiling with the half tester and the crown--and they even kissed him like attending angels when he ... he ... mounted the mother, so to speak.

  "I'll never forget those children, the way it all seemed so natural to them! And natural to Julien.

  "Of course he behaved throughout all this as gracefully in such a situation as a human being could possibly behave. You would have thought that he was Darius, King of Persia, and that these ladies were his harem, and there was not the slightest bit of self-consciousness in him or crudery. Afterwards, he drank some more champagne with them, and even the little girls drank it. The mother tried to work her charms on me, but I would have none of it. Julien would have stayed there all night if I hadn't asked him to leave. He was teaching both the girls 'a new poem.' Seems he taught them a poem every time he came down; and they recited three or four of the past lessons for him, one a Shakespeare sonnet. The new one was Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

  "I couldn't wait to leave that place. And on the way home, I really lit into him. 'Julien, whatever we are, we are grown people. Those were just children,' I said. He was his usual genial self. 'Come on, now, Richard,' he said, 'don't be foolish. Those were what are called trick babies. They were born in a house of prostitution; and they'll live out their lives that way. I didn't do anything to them that would hurt them. And if I hadn't been with their mother this evening, somebody else would have been with her and with them. But I'll tell you what strikes me, Richard, about the whole matter. It's the way that life asserts itself, no matter what the circumstances. Of course it must be a miserable existence. How could it not be? Yet those little girls manage to live; to breathe; to enjoy themselves. They laugh and they are full of curiosity and tenderness. They adjust, I believe that's the word. They adjust and they reach for the stars in their own way. I tell you it's wondrous to me. They make me think of the wildflowers that grow in the cracks of the pavements, just pushing up into the sun, no matter how many feet crush them down.'

  "I didn't argue with him any further. But I remember that he talked on and on. He said there were children in every city in the country who were more miserable than those children. Of course that didn't make it all right.

  "I know he went to Storyville often, and he didn't take me along. But I'll tell you something else rather strange ... " (Here he hesitated. He required some prodding.) "He used to take Mary Beth with him. He took her to Lulu White's and to the Arlington, and the way they managed it was that Mary Beth dressed as a man.

  "I saw them go out together on more than one occasion, and of course if you ever saw Mary Beth you would understand. She was not an ugly woman in any sense, but she wasn't delicate. She was tall and strongly built, and she had rather large features. In one of her husband's three-piece suits, she made a damned good-looking man. She'd wrap her long hair up under a hat, and wear a scarf around her neck, and sometimes she wore glasses, though I'm not sure why, and off she went with Julien.

  "I remember that happening at least five times. And I heard them talking about it after, how she fooled everyone. And Judge McIntyre sometimes went with them, but I think in truth that Julien and Mary Beth didn't want him along.

  "And then once Julien told me that that was how Judge McIntyre had met Mary Beth Mayfair--that it was in Storyville about two years before I came. He wasn't Judge McIntyre yet, then, just Daniel McIntyre. And he'd met Mary Beth down there and spent the evening gambling with her and with Julien, and didn't know till the next morning that Mary Beth was a woman, and when he discovered that he wouldn't leave her alone.

  "Julien told me all about it. They had gone down just to roam around and to catch what they could of the Razzy Dazzy Spasm Band. Now you've heard of them, I imagine, and they were good, they really were. And somehow Julien and Mary Beth, who went by the name of Jules on these excursions, went into Willie Piazza's and there they ran into Daniel McIntyre, and after that they wandered from place to place, looking for a good pool game, because Mary Beth was very good at pocket billiards, always was.

  "Anyway, it must have been daylight when they decided to go home, and Judge McIntyre had talked a lot of business with Julien, since he wasn't the Judge yet of course and he was a lawyer, and it was determined they would meet uptown for lunch and that maybe Julien would do something to help McIntyre get into a firm. And at that point, when the Judge was giving 'Jules' a big hug of farewell, she pulled off her fedora, and down came all her black hair, and she told him she was a woman, and he almost died on the spot.

  "I think he was in love with her from that day on. I came the year after they were married, and they already had Miss Carlotta, a baby in the crib, and Lionel came along within ten months, and then a year and half later, Stella, the prettiest of them all.

  "To tell you the truth, Judge McIntyre never fell out of love with Mary Beth. That was his trouble. Nineteen hundred thirteen was the last full year I spent in that house, and of course he had been a judge for over eight years by then, thanks to Julien's influence, and I tell you he was just as much in love with Mary Beth as he had ever been. And in her own way she was in love with him, too. Don't guess she could have put up with him if she hadn't been.

  "Of course there were the young men. People talked about those young men. You know, her stable boys and her messenger boys, and they were good-looking, they really were. You'd see them coming down the back steps, you know, looking scared sort of, as they went out the back door. But she loved Judge McIntyre, she really did, and I'll tell you another thing. I don't think he ever guessed. He was so damned drunk all the time. And Mary Beth was just as cool about all that as she was about anything else. Mary Beth was the calmest person I ever knew, in a way. Nothing ruffled her, not for very long, at any rate. She didn't have much patience with anyone who opposed her, but she wasn't interested in being enemies with a person, you know. She wasn't one to fight or pit her will against anyone else.

  "It always amazed me the way she put up with Carlotta. Carlotta was thirteen years old when I left. She was a witch, that child! She wanted to go to school away from home, and Mary Beth tried to persuade her not to do it, but that girl was determined, and so Mary Beth finally just let her go.

  "Mary Beth dismissed people like that, that's the way it was, really, and you might say she dismissed Carlotta. Part of her coldness, I suppose, and it could be maddening. When Julien died, the way she locked me out of the library, and out of the third-floor bedroom, that I'll never forget. She never did get the least bit excited. 'Go on, now Richard, you go downstairs, and have some coffee, and then you best get packed,' she said, as if she was talking to a little child. She bought a building for me down here, lickety split. I mean Julien wasn't in the ground when she had bought that building and moved me downtown. Of course, it was Julien's money.

  "But no, she never got excited. Except when I told her Julien was dead. Then she got excited. Yes, to tell the truth, she went mad. But just for a little while. Then when she saw he really was gone, she just snapped to and started straightening him up and straightening up the bedcovers. And I never saw her shed another tear.

  "I'll tell you a strange thing about Julien's funeral, though. Mary Beth did a strange thing. It was in that front room, of course, and the coffin was open and Julien was a handsome corpse
and every Mayfair in Louisiana was there. Why, there were carriages and automobiles lined up for blocks on First and Chestnut streets. And it rained, oh, did it rain! I thought it would never stop. It was so thick it was like a veil around the house. But the main thing was this. They were waking Julien, you know, and it wasn't really what you'd call an Irish wake, of course, because they were far too high-toned for that sort of thing, but there was wine and food, and the Judge was blind drunk naturally. And at one point, with all those people in the room and all the goings-on, and people all over the hallway and back in the dining room and in the library and up the steps, well, with all that just going on, Mary Beth just moved a straight-backed chair up, right beside the coffin, and she put her hand in the coffin and clasped Julien's dead hand, and she just went to dozing right there, in that chair, with her head to one side, holding on to Julien as the cousins came and went to see him, and kneel on the prie-dieu and so forth and so on.

  "It was a tender thing that. But jealous as I had always been of her, I loved her for it. I wish I could have done it. Julien certainly did look fine in the coffin. And you should have seen the umbrellas in the Lafayette Cemetery the next day! I tell you when they slipped that coffin inside the vault, I died myself inside. And Mary Beth came up to me at that very moment, and she put her arm around my shoulder, and so that I could hear it, she whispered, 'Au revoir, mon cher Julien!' She did it for me, I know she did. She did it for me, but that was about the warmest thing she ever did. And to her dying day, she denied that he had ever written any autobiography."

  I prodded him at this point, asking him if Carlotta had cried at the funeral.

  "Indeed not. I don't even remember seeing her there. She was such an awful child. So humorless and antagonistic to everyone. Mary Beth could take it in stride. But Julien used to get so upset with her. It was Mary Beth who calmed him down. Julien told me once that Carlotta would waste her life the same way his sister, Katherine, had wasted hers.