I shuddered. I thought I was going to scream.
Grady Dubosson had arrived, my friend and lawyer, trusted advisor to Karl and Karl's mother. Miss Hardy was here, had been here for the longest time, and so were several other women from the Preservation Guild, all of them elegant and refined creatures.
Connie Wolfstan said, "We want something, just some little thing, you know, that you wouldn't mind us keeping, to remember him by ... I don't know ... just the four of us."
I was so relieved. "The silver," I said. "There's so much of it, and he loved it. You know, he corresponded with silver dealers all over the country to buy up Love Disarmed. Look, see that, that little fork, that's actually what you call a strawberry fork."
"You really wouldn't mind if we each took--"
"Oh, God, I was afraid, afraid that you would be afraid because of his illness. There is so much of it. There's enough for all of you."
A loud noise disturbed us. Someone had fallen over. I knew this cousin was one of those few that was kin to both the Beckers of my family and the Wolfstans of Karl's, but I couldn't remember his name.
He was drunk, poor guy, and I could see his wife was furious. They helped him up. There were long wet stains on his gray trousers.
I wanted to speak, to form words about the silver. I heard Katrinka say, "What are they trying to take?" and it came out of my mouth to Althea as she passed, "His silver, you know all that silverware, let his family all take a piece of it."
I felt my face color as Katrinka glared at me. She said that it was community property, the silver.
For the first time I realized that sooner or later all these people would be gone and I'd be alone here and maybe he wouldn't come back, and I saw desperately how his music had comforted me, how it had guided me through memory after memory, and now I was bedeviled, and shaking my head, and obviously looking odd.
What was I wearing? I looked down. A long full silk skirt and a frilly blouse, and a velvet vest that disguised my weight--Triana's uniform, they called it.
There was quite a commotion in the pantry. The silver had been brought out. Katrinka was saying something biting and terrible to poor sad Rosalind, and Rosalind, with her dark eyebrows pointing up and her glasses sliding down her nose, looked lost and in need of help.
My cousin Barbara leaned down to kiss me. They had to go. Her husband couldn't drive anymore after dark, at least he really shouldn't. I understood. I held her tightly for a moment, pressing my lips into her cheek. When I kissed her, it was like I kissed her mother, my long gone great-aunt, and my grandmother who had been that woman's sister.
Katrinka suddenly turned me around, hurting my shoulder. "They're sacking the pantry!"
I got up and made a gesture for her to be quiet, my finger to my lips, which I knew, positively knew, would make her boilingly furious. It did. She backed away. One of Karl's aunts came to kiss me and thank me for the small teaspoon she held.
"Oh, it would make him so happy--" I said. He was always sending Love Disarmed to people as gifts and writing, "Now, be sure to tell me if you do not like this pattern because I may inundate you with it." I think I tried to explain that, but clear words were so difficult for me to utter. I moved away, using this person in a way as a means of escape, escorting her to the door, and though others waved as they went down the steps, I went off along the porch and looked out over the Avenue.
He wasn't there. He probably had never existed. With a crashing force, I thought of my Mother, but it wasn't the day before she died. It was another time when I'd given a birthday party for one of my friends. My mother had been drunk for weeks, locked up in the side bedroom, sort of, dead drunk the way she always got, only becoming conscious in the very late hours to roam around, and somehow she'd come wandering out at this party!
She'd come wandering onto the porch, deranged and looking for all the world like Jane Eyre's strange rival, the mad woman in Rochester's attic. We'd taken her back inside, but was I kind, did I kiss her? I couldn't remember. It was too disgusting to think of being that young and that thoughtless, and then it hit me again with a mighty force that I'd let her go, let her die of drunkenness alone, with cousins before whom she was ashamed.
What was the murder of Lily, the failure to save Lily, compared to this?
I gripped the railing. The house was emptying.
The fiddler had been a piece of madness, music imagined! Crazy, lovely, comforting music, spun out of the subconscious by a desperate ordinary talentless person, too pedestrian in every respect to enjoy a fortune left to her.
Oh, God, I wanted to die. I knew where the gun was, and I thought, If you wait just a few weeks, everyone will feel better. If you do it now, then everyone will think it was his or her fault. And then what if Faye is alive somewhere and she comes home and finds her big sister has done such a thing; what if Faye were to take that blame on herself? Unthinkable!
Kisses, waving hands. A sudden rain of delicious perfume--Karl's Aunt Gertrude, and then her husband's soft, crinkled hand.
Karl had whispered to me when he could no longer turn over without help, "At least I'll never know what it means to be old, will I, Triana?"
I turned and looked down over the side lawn. The lights of the florist blazed on the wet grass and the wet bricks beyond, and I tried to calculate where the path had been down which my mother walked on that last day that I saw her. It was gone. During the years in California, when my father was married to his Protestant wife--out of the church, saying his Rosary every night nevertheless, a damned soul, making her perfectly miserable, no doubt--they'd built a garage. The vogue of the automobile had descended even on New Orleans. And there was no old wooden gate now to be Mother's shrine, her gateway to eternity.
I was choking, trying to catch my breath. I turned around. I looked down the long porch. People everywhere. But I could picture my Mother the night she wandered out, perfectly. My Mother had been beautiful, much more good-looking in every respect than any of her daughters, it seemed; she'd had such a wild expression on her face, lost among all these partying teenagers, awakened from a drunken sleep, not knowing where she was, friendless, only weeks from death.
I tried to catch my breath.
"--all you did for him." A voice spoke.
"For whom?" I said. "Daddy," said Rosalind, "and then to take care of Karl."
"Don't talk about it. When I die I want to wander off into the woods alone." Or use the gun shortly.
"Don't we all?" Rosalind said. "But that's just it. You fall and break a hip like Dad and someone slaps you in bed with needles and tubes, or like Karl, they tell you one more go-round of drugs and maybe--"
She went on, being Rosalind, the nurse and the sharer with me of morbid things as we are two sisters both born in different years but in the month of October.
So vividly I saw Lily in a coffin, imagined now with green mold, her small round face, her lovely tiny hand, plump and beautiful on her breast, her country dancing dress, the last dress that I had ever ironed for her, and my Father saying, They will do that at the funeral parlor, but I had wanted to iron it myself, the last dress, the last dress.
Lev said later of his new bride, Chelsea, "I need her so much, Triana, I need her. She's like Lily to me again. It's like I have Lily."
I had said I understood. I think I was numb. Numb is the only way to describe how I'd feel when I sat in the other room and Chelsea and Lev made love, and then they'd come in and kiss me and Chelsea would say I was the most unusual woman she'd ever known.
Now that really is funny!
I was going to start to cry. Disaster! There were car doors closing, dark shadows against the florist shop of people waving farewell.
Grady called from inside the house. I could hear Katrinka. So the moment had come.
I turned and walked down the length of the wet porch, past the rocking chairs that were dappled with drops of rain, and I turned and looked into the wide hall. It was the most lovely view, because the great mirror at the
far end, on the dining room wall, reflected both chandeliers, the small one of the hallway and the large one of the dining room, and it did seem you were looking down a truly grand corridor.
My Dad had made such speeches about the importance of those chandeliers, how my mother had loved them, how he'd never sell those chandeliers! Never, never, never. Funny thing was, I couldn't remember who asked him to do it, or when or how. Because after my Mother's death, and with all of us gone eventually, he had done very well, and before that, my Mother would never have let anyone touch those treasures.
The house was almost empty.
I went inside. I was not myself. I was frozen inside an alien form and the voice that came out could not be trusted. Katrinka was crying and had made her handkerchief into a knot.
I followed Grady into the front room where the high-top desk stood, between the front windows.
"I keep remembering things, such things," I said. "Maybe it's to chase away the present, but he died at peace, he didn't suffer as much as we feared, he, we all ..."
"Darlin', you sit down," said Grady. "Your sister here is determined to discuss this house here and now. Seems she was indeed piqued by your Father's will, just as you said, and feels she's entitled to a portion of the sale of this house."
Katrinka looked at him in amazement. Her husband, Martin, shook his head and glanced at Rosalind's sweet-hearted husband, Glenn.
"Well, Katrinka is entitled," I said, "when I die." I looked up. The words had silenced everybody. Slinging the word "die" with such abandon, I guess.
Katrinka put her hands to her face and turned away. Rosalind had only flinched. And declared in her low stentorian voice, "I don't want anything!"
Glenn made some sharp low remark to Katrinka, to which Katrinka's husband, Martin, violently objected.
"Look, ladies, let's come to the point," said Grady. "Triana, you and I have discussed this moment. We are prepared for it. Indeed, we are well prepared."
"We have?" I was dreaming. I wasn't there. I could see them all. I knew there was no danger of anyone selling this house. I knew it. I knew things that none of them knew except Grady, but it wasn't that that mattered; it was that my violinist had consoled me when I thought of all the dead in the soft earth, and I'd imagined the thing, imagined it!
There had been some conversation--surely the evidence of madness. And it was madness that he'd said he wanted, but that was a lie. It was a balm he brought to me, a salve, a covering of kisses. His music knew! His music didn't lie. His music--.
Grady touched my hand. Katrinka's husband, Martin, said this wasn't a good time, and Glenn said that it wasn't a good time, and these words made no impression.
Lord God, to be born with no talent is bad enough, but to have a macabre and febrile imagination as well is a curse. I stared at the big picture of St. Sebastian over the fireplace. One of Karl's most treasured possessions--the original of the print that would be put on the cover of his book.
The suffering saint was marvelously erotic, tied to the tree, pierced with so many arrows.
And there on the other wall, over the couch, the big painting of flowers. So like Monet, they said.
It was a painting Lev had done for me and sent from Providence, Rhode Island, when he'd been teaching at Brown. Lev and Katrinka. Lev and Chelsea.
Katrinka had been only eighteen. I should never, never have let it all come to that; it was my fault getting Katrinka into that with Lev, and he was so ashamed, and she, what did she say afterwards, that when a woman was as pregnant as I was, that these things--no. I had said that to her, to tell her it was all right, that I was sorry, that I, that he--
I looked up at her. She was so distant, this slender anxious woman, from my solemn and silent little sister Katrinka. Katrinka when she was little had come home once with my Mother, and my Mother, drunk, had passed out on the porch, with the keys to the house in her purse, and little Katrinka, only six, had sat there five hours waiting for me to come home, ashamed to ask anyone to help, sitting there, beside this woman lying on the porch, a little child just sitting there waiting. "She fell down when we got off the streetcar, but she got up."
Shame, blame, maim, pain, vain!
I looked down on the surface of the table. I saw my hands. I saw the checkbook lying there, blue vinyl, or some other slimy and fiercely strong and ugly material like that, a long rectangular checkbook of the simplest kind, with checks in one side, and in the other tucked a thin-lined ledger.
I am a person who never bothers to enter a check into a ledger. But that was of no importance anymore at all. No talent for numbers, no talent for music. Mozart could play backwards. Mozart probably was a mathematical genius, but then Beethoven, he was nothing as sharp, a wholly different kind of ...
"Triana."
"Yes, Grady."
I tried to pay attention to Grady's words.
Katrinka wanted the house sold, he said, the inheritance divided. She wanted me to sign over my right to remain in the house until death--"usufruct," as it is called under the law--the use of the house until my death, a right in fact shared by me and Faye. Now, how was I supposed to do that, with Faye utterly gone, I thought, and Grady was addressing this in a long drawn out, beautifully drawling way, saying that various attempts had been made to reach Faye, just as if Faye was really all right. Grady's accent was part Mississippi and part Louisiana and always melodious.
One time Katrinka told me that Mother put Faye in the bathtub. Faye was not even two years old, just able to sit up. Mother went "to sleep," which meant drunk, and Katrinka found Faye sitting in the tub, and the tub was full of excrement, turds floating in the water, and Faye was happily splashing, well, that happens, doesn't it, and Katrinka so little at the time. I came home, I was tired. I slammed my school books down. I didn't want to know! I didn't. The house was so dark and so cold. They were too little, either of them, to turn on the gas heaters in this house then, which were without pilot lights and on the open hearths and so dangerous they could anytime set the house on fire. There was no heat! Don't! The danger of fire with them alone and her drunk--. Don't.
It's not like that now!
"Faye is alive," I whispered. "She is ... somewhere."
No one heard.
Grady had written the check already.
He placed it in front of me. "Do you want me to say what you asked me to say?" he said. This was confidential and kind of him.
Suddenly it jolted me. Of course. I had planned it, in angst and coldness, on a dark shadowy day when Karl was hurting with every breath, that if she ever tried this, my sister, my poor lost orphaned sister, Katrinka, that I would do this to her. We had planned it. I had told Grady, and Grady had had no choice but to follow my advice, and thought it most prudent besides, and he had a small statement to read.
"How much do you calculate this house is worth, Mrs. Russell?" he asked Katrinka. "What would you say?"
"Well, at least a million dollars," Katrinka answered, which was absurd because there were many larger more beautiful houses in New Orleans for sale for less than that. Karl used to marvel at it. And Katrinka and her husband, Martin, who sold real estate, knew this better than anyone, as they were fabulously successful uptown; they had their own company.
I stared at Rosalind. Back then, in the dark years, she had read her books and dreamed. She had taken one look at Mother drunk on the bed and then gone into her room with her books. She read Edgar Rice Burroughs, John Carter of Mars. She had been so beautifully proportioned then. Her dark curly hair was lovely. We were not a bad lot, and each with a different shade of hair.
"Triana."
My mother was beautiful till the moment she died. The funeral home called. They said, "This woman has swallowed her tongue." What did that mean? The cousins with whom she'd died had not even seen her for years, and in their arms she died, with all her long brown hair still brown, not a single gray strand, I remember that, her high forehead--it is not easy to be beautiful with a high forehead, but she
was. That last day, as she went down the path, her hair was brushed and pinned. Who had done it for her?
She had cut it short only once. But that had been years before. I had come home from school. Katrinka was a baby still, running around the flagstones in pink panties as children did then, all day in the southern heat. No one thought to outfit them in name-brand suits. And my Mother told me quietly that she had cut her hair, that she had sold it.
What had I said to her? Had I reassured her that she was pretty, that it was fine? I couldn't remember her with short hair at all. And only years later did I understand; she sold her hair, sold her hair, to buy the liquor. Oh, God!
I wanted to ask Rosalind what she thought, if it had been a sin unforgivable not to say goodbye to our Mother. But I couldn't do such a selfish thing! There sat Rosalind in torment, looking from Grady to Katrinka.
Rosalind had her own terrible memories that hurt her so bad she drank and cried. Once, before our Mother had died, Rosalind had run into Mother coming up the front steps. Our Mother had a package of liquor in her hand, a flat flask wrapped the way they did then at "package liquor stores," in brown paper, and Rosalind had called her a "drunk," and later confessed to me sobbing, and I had said over and over, "She didn't know, she forgave, she understood, Rosalind, don't." My Mother, never in her life at a loss for words, had in this sad story only smiled at the young Rosalind who was then seventeen, only two years older than me.
Mother! I'm going to die!
I sucked in my breath.
"Do you want me to read the statement?" Grady asked. "You wanted closure. Do you want perhaps to ..."
"A modern word, that, closure," I said.
"You're crazy," said Katrinka. "You were crazy when you let Lev go--you just gave your own husband to Chelsea and you know it--you were crazy when you nursed Father, you didn't have to have all that medicine for Father, you didn't have to have the oxygen machines and the nurses and use up every cent he had, you didn't have to do that, you did it out of guilt and you know you did, plain guilt because of Lily ..." At Lily's name her voice broke.
Look at her tears.
She could hardly bear to say Lily's name even now.
"You drove Faye away," she said, her face red, swollen, childlike, frantic, "and you were crazy to marry a dying man! To bring a dying man in here, I don't care if he did have money, I don't care if he did fix up the house, I don't care if ... You have no right, no right to do these things ..."