The Witching Hour

  Annunciation Street broke his heart. The fine renovations and fresh paint jobs he had glimpsed on Constance and Laurel were few and far between on this neglected street. Garbage and old tires littered the empty lots. The double cottage in which he'd grown up was abandoned, with big slabs of weathered plywood covering all its doors and windows; and the yard in which he'd played was now a jungle of weeds, enclosed by an ugly chain-link fence. He saw nothing of the old four o'clocks which had bloomed pink and fragrant summer and winter; and gone were the banana trees by the old shed at the end of the side alley. The little corner grocery was padlocked and deserted. And the old corner bar showed not the slightest sign of life.

  Gradually he realized he was the only white man to be seen.

  He walked on deeper it seemed into the sadness and the shabbiness. Here and there was a nicely painted house; a pretty black child with braided hair and round quiet eyes clung to the gate, staring up at him. But all the people he might have known were long gone.

  And the dreary decay of Jackson Avenue at this point hurt him to see it. Yet on he walked, towards the brick tenements of the St. Thomas Project. No white people lived in there anymore. No one had to tell him that.

  This was the black man's town back here now, and he felt cold appraising eyes on him as he turned down Josephine Street towards the old churches and the old school. More boarded-up wooden cottages; the lower floor of a tenement completely gutted. Ripped and swollen furniture piled at a curb.

  In spite of what he had seen before, the decay of the abandoned school buildings shocked him. There was glass broken out from the windows of the rooms in which he'd studied in those long-ago years. And there, the gymnasium he had helped to build appeared so worn, so past its time, so utterly forgotten.

  Only the churches of St. Mary's and St. Alphonsus stood proud and seemingly indestructible. But their doors were locked. And in the sacristy yard of St. Alphonsus, the weeds grew up to his knees. He could see the old electrical boxes open and rusted, the fuses torn out.

  "Ya wanna see the church?"

  He turned. A small balding man with a rounded belly and a sweating pink face was talking to him. "Ya can go in the rectory and they'll take ya in," the man said.

  Michael nodded.

  Even the rectory was locked. You had to ring a bell and wait for the buzzer; and the little woman with the thick glasses and the short brown hair spoke through a glass.

  He drew out a handful of twenty-dollar bills. "Let me make a donation," he said. "I'd love to see both churches if I could."

  "You can't see St. Alphonsus," she said. "It isn't used now. It isn't safe. The plaster's falling."

  The plaster! He remembered the glorious murals on the ceiling, the saints peering down at him from a blue sky. Under that roof, he had been baptized, made his First Communion, and later Confirmation. And that last night here, he had walked down the aisle of St. Alphonsus in his white cap and gown, with the other high school graduates, not even thinking to take a last slow look around because he was excited to be going with his mother out west.

  "Where did they all go?" he asked.

  "Moved away," she said, as she beckoned for him to follow her. She was taking him through the priest house itself into St. Mary's. "And the colored don't come."

  "But why is it all locked?"

  "We've had one robbery after another."

  He couldn't conceive of it, not being able to wander into a quiet, shadowy church at any hour. Not being able to escape the noisy sun-cooked street, and sit in the dim quiet, talking to the angels and the saints, while old women in flowered dresses and straw hats knelt whispering with dried lips their rosaries.

  She led him through the sanctuary. He had been an altar boy here. He had prepared the sacramental wine. He felt a little throb of happiness when he saw the rows and rows of wooden saints, when he saw the long high nave with its successive Gothic arches. All splendid, all intact.

  Thank God this was still standing. He was getting choked up. He shoved his hands in his pockets and lowered his head, only looking up slowly under his brows. His memories of Masses here and Masses across the street at St. Alphonsus mingled completely. There had been no German-Irish quarrel by his time, just all the German and Irish names jumbled together. And the grammar school had used the other church for morning Mass. The high school had filled up St. Mary's.

  It took no imagination to see again the uniformed students filing out of the rows to go to Communion. Girls in white blouses and blue wool skirts, boys in their khaki shirts and trousers. But memory scanned all the years; when he was eight years old he'd swung the smoking incense here, on these steps, for Benediction.

  "Take your time," the little woman said. "Just come back through the rectory when you're finished."

  For a half hour he sat in the first pew. He did not know precisely what he was doing. Memorizing, perhaps, the details he could not have called forth from his recollections. Never to forget again the names carved in the marble floor of those buried under the altar. Never to forget perhaps the painted angels high above. Or the window far to his right in which the angels and the saints wore wooden shoes! How curious. Could anyone now have explained such a thing? And to think he'd never noticed it before, and when he thought of all those hours spent in this church ...

  Think of Marie Louise with her big breasts beneath the starched white uniform blouse, reading her missal at Mass. And Rita Mae Dwyer, who had looked like a grown woman at fourteen. She wore very high heels and huge gold earrings with her red dress on Sunday. Michael's father had been one of the men who moved down the aisles with the collection basket on its long stick, thrusting it into row after row, face appropriately solemn. You did not even whisper in a Catholic church in those days unless you had to.

  What did he think, that they would have all been here, waiting for him? A dozen Rita Maes in flowered dresses, making a noon visit?

  Last night, Rita Mae had said, "Don't go back there, Mike. Remember it the way it used to be."

  Finally he climbed to his feet. He wandered up the aisle to wards the old wooden confessionals. He found the plaque on the wall listing those who had in the recent past paid for restoration. He closed his eyes, and just for a moment imagined he heard children playing in the school yards--the noontime roar of mingled voices.

  There was no such sound. No heavy swish of the swinging doors as the parishioners came and went. Only the solemn empty place. And the Virgin under her crown on the high altar.

  Small, far away, the image seemed. And it occurred to him intellectually that he ought to pray to it. He ought to ask the Virgin or God why he had been brought back here, what it meant that he'd been snatched from the cold grip of death. But he had no belief in the images on the altar. No memory of childlike belief came back to him.

  Instead the memory that came was specific and uncomfortable, and shabby and mean. He and Marie Louise had met to exchange secrets right inside one of these tall front doors. In the pouring rain it had been. And Marie Louise had confessed, reluctantly, that no, she wasn't pregnant, angry for being made to confess it, angry that he was so relieved. "Don't you want to get married? Why are we playing these stupid games!"

  What would have happened to him if he had married Marie Louise? He saw her big, sullen brown eyes again. He felt her sourness, her disappointment. He could not imagine such a thing.

  Marie Louise's voice came back again. "You know you're going to marry me sooner or later. We're meant for each other."

  Meant. Had he been meant to leave here, meant to do the things he'd done in his life, meant to travel so far? Meant to fall from the rock into the sea and drift slowly out, away from all the lights of land?

  He thought of Rowan--not merely of the visual image, but of everything Rowan was to him now. He thought of her sweetness and sensuality, and mystery, of her lean taut body snuggled against his under the covers, of her velvety voice and her cold eyes. He thought of the way she looked at him before they made love, so unself-consc
ious, forgetting her own body completely, absorbed in his body. In sum, looking at him the way a man looked at a woman. Just as hungry and just as aggressive and yet yielding so magically in his arms.

  He was still staring at the altar--staring at the whole vast and gorgeously ornamented church.

  He wished he could believe in something. And then he realized that he did. He still believed in his visions, in the goodness of the visions. He believed in them and their goodness as surely as people believed in God or saints, or the God-given lightness of a certain path, as truly as they believed in a vocation.

  And this seemed as foolish as the other beliefs. "But I saw, but I felt, but I remember, but I know ... " So much stammering. After all he still couldn't remember. Nothing in the entire Mayfair history had really brought him back to those precious moments, except the image of Deborah, and for all his certainty that she had been the one who had come to him, he had no real details, no truly remembered moments or words.

  On impulse, his eyes still fixed on the altar, he made the sign of the cross.

  How many years had it been since he'd done that every day, three times a day? Curiously, thoughtfully, he did it again. "In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost," his eyes still fixed on the Virgin.

  "What do they want of me?" he whispered. And trying to reinvoke what little he could of the visions, he realized in despair that the image of the dark-haired woman he had seen was now replaced by the descriptive image of Deborah in the history. One had blotted out the other! He had lost through his reading, not gained.

  After a little while more, of standing there in silence, his gloved hands shoved in his pockets, he went slowly back down the aisle, until he had come to the altar rail, and then he walked up the marble steps, crossed the sanctuary, and found his way out through the priest house.

  The sun was beating down on Constance Street the way it always had. Merciless and ugly. No trees here. And the garden of the priest house hidden behind its high brick wall, and the lawn beside St. Mary's burned and tired and dusty.

  The holy store on the far corner, with all its pretty little statues and holy pictures, was no more. Boards on the windows. A real estate sign on the painted wooden wall.

  The little bald man with the sweaty red face sat on the rectory steps, his arms folded on his knees, eyes following a gust of gray-winged pigeons as they flew up the dreary peeling facade of St. Alphonsus.

  "They oughtta poison them birds," he said. "They dirty up everything."

  Michael lighted a cigarette, offered one to the man. The man took it with a nod. Michael gave him the near empty matchbook.

  "Son, why don't you take off that gold watch and slip it inside your pocket?" the man said. "Don't walk around here with that thing on your wrist, ya hear?"

  "They want my watch," Michael said, "they're gonna take my wrist with it, and the fist that's attached to it."

  The old man just shrugged and shook his head.

  Up on the corner of Magazine and Jackson Michael went in a dark, evil-looking bar, in the sorriest old sagging wooden clapboard building. In all his years in San Francisco, he had never seen such a run-down place. A white man hung like a shadow at the far end, staring at him with glittering eyes out of a cracked and caved-in face. The bartender too was white.

  "Give me a beer," Michael said.

  "What kind?"

  "I don't give a damn."

  He timed it perfectly. At three minutes before three he was crossing Camp Street, walking slowly, so the heat would not kill him, and soothed once more by the sweet shade and random beauty of the Garden District. Yes, all this was as it had always been. And at once he felt good; at once he felt he was where he wanted to be, and maybe even where he ought to be, if one could chart a course of one's own.

  At three P.M. exactly he stood at the open gate. This was the first time he had seen the house in the sunlight, and his pulse quickened. Here, yes. Even in its neglect it was dignified, grand, merely slumbering beneath the overhanging vines, its long shutters caked with flaking green paint yet still hanging straight on their iron hinges. Waiting ...

  A giddiness overtook him as he looked at it, a swift delight that for whatever reasons, he had come back. Doing what I am supposed to be doing ...

  He went up the marble steps, and pushed at the door, and when it opened he walked into the long broad hallway. Never in San Francisco had he been in such a structure, had he stood under such a high ceiling, or looked at doorways so graceful and tall.

  A deep luster clung to the heart pine boards in spite of the margin of sticky dust that ran along the walls. Paint flaked from the high crown moldings but they themselves were sound. He felt love for everything he saw--love for the workmanship of the tapering keyhole doorways, and the fine newel post and balusters of the long stairway. He liked the feel of the floor beneath his feet, so solid. And the warm good wood smell of the house filled him with a sudden welcome contentment. A house smelled like this in only one place in the whole world.

  "Michael? Come in, Michael."

  He walked to the first of the two living room doors. Dark and shadowy still, though she had opened all the drapes. The light was slatted coming through the shutters, and dim and soft pouring through the dirty screens of the porch beyond the side windows. Whiff of honeysuckle. So sweet and good. And was that the Queen's Wreath bursting in little bright pink sprigs along the screens? He had not seen that lovely wild vine in all this time.

  She was sitting, small and very pretty, on the long brown velvet couch with its back to the front of the house. Her hair was falling down beautifully against her cheek. She had on one of those loose wrinkled cotton overshirts that is as light as silk, and her face and throat looked darkly tanned against the white T-shirt under it. Legs long in the white pants, her toes naked and surprisingly sexy, with a thin flash of red polish, in her white sandals.

  "The Witch of Endor," he said, swooping down to kiss her cheek and hold her face in his left hand, warm, tender.

  She took hold of both his wrists, clinging to him, kissing him roughly and sweetly on the mouth. He could feel the tremor in her limbs, the fever in her.

  "You've been here all alone?"

  She sat back as he took his place beside her.

  "And why the hell not?" she asked in her slow deep voice. "I quit the hospital officially this afternoon. I'm going to apply for a job here. I'm going to stay here, in this house."

  He let out a long whistling sigh and smiled. "You mean it?"

  "Well, what do you think?"

  "I don't know. All the way over here ... coming back from the Irish Channel, I kept thinking maybe you'd be here with your bag packed to go back."

  "No. Not a chance. I've already discussed three or four different hospitals here with my old boss in San Francisco. He's making calls for me. But what about you?"

  "What do you mean what about me?" he asked. "You know why I'm here. Where am I going to go? They brought me here. They're not telling me to go anyplace else. They're not telling me anything. I still can't remember. I read four hundred pages of the history and I can't remember. It was Deborah I saw, I know that much, but I don't really know what she said."

  "You're tired and hot," she said, touching her hand to his forehead. "You're talking crazy."

  He gave a little surprised laugh. "Listen to you," he said, "the Witch of Endor. Didn't you read the history? What's going on, Rowan? Didn't you read all that? We're in a big spiderweb, and we don't know who's done the weaving." He held out his gloved hands, looking down at his fingers. "We just don't know."

  She gave him a quiet, remote look, which made her face seem very cold, even though it was flushed, and her gray eyes were picking up the light wonderfully.

  "Well, you read it, didn't you? What did you think when you read it? What did you think?"

  "Michael, calm down," she said. "You're not asking me what I think. You're asking me what I feel. I've been telling you what I think. We're not stuck in any web,
and nobody's doing the weaving. And you want my advice? Forget about them. Forget about what they want, these people you saw in your visions. Forget them from now on."

  "What do you mean 'forget'?"

  "OK, listen to me. I've been sitting here thinking for hours, thinking about it all. This is my decision. I'm staying here, and I'm staying here because this is my house and I like it. And I like the family I met yesterday. I like them. I want to know them. I want to hear their voices and know their faces, and learn what they have to teach. And also, I know I wouldn't be able to forget that old woman and what I did to her no matter where I went." She stopped, a flash of sudden emotion transfiguring her face for a second, then gone again, leaving it taut and cool. She folded her arms lightly, one foot up on the edge of the small coffee table. "Are you listening?"

  "Yeah, of course."

  "OK, I want you to stay here, too. I hope and pray you will stay here. But not because of this pattern or this web or whatever it is. Not because of these visions or because of the man. Because there is absolutely no way to figure out what these things mean, Michael, or what's meant, to use the word you wrote in your notes, or why you and I were thrown together. There is no way to know."

  She paused, her eyes scanning him intently. Then she went on:

  "So I've made my decision," she said, her words coming more slowly, "based on what I can know, and what I can see, and what I can define and understand, and that is, that this place is where I belong, because I want to belong."

  He nodded. "I hear you," he said.

  "What I'm saying is that I'm staying here in spite of this man and this seeming pattern, this coincidence of me pulling you up out of the ocean and you being what you are."

  He nodded again, a little hesitantly, and then sat back taking a deep breath, his eyes not letting go of hers. "But you can't tell me," he said, "that you don't want to communicate with this thing, that you don't want to understand the meaning of all this ... "