"The book," I said. "The book is marvelous. St. Sebastian, shot full with arrows, an enigmatic saint."
"You think so? You know about him?" How delighted Karl had been when I told the stories of the saints.
"Our Catholicism," I had said, "was so thick and ornamented and rule-ridden in those early days, we were like the Hasidim."
Ashes, this man! Ashes! And it would be a coffee table book, a Christmas gift, a library staple that art students would eventually destroy by cutting out the prints. But we would make it live forever. Karl Wolfstan's St. Sebastian.
I sank to dreariness. I sank to the sense of the small scope of Karl's life, a fine and worthy life, but not a great life, not a life of gifts such as I had dreamed up when I tried so hard to learn the violin, such as Lev, my first husband, still struggled to maintain with every poem he wrote.
I stopped. I listened.
He wasn't about, the fiddler.
I could hear no music. I looked back and then up the street. I watched the cars pass. No music. Not the slightest dimmest sound of music.
I deliberately thought of him, my violinist, point by point, that with his long narrow nose and such deep-set eyes he might have been less seductive to someone else--perhaps. But then perhaps to no one. What a well-formed mouth he had, and how the narrow eyes, the detailed deepened lids gave him such a range of expression, to open his gaze wide, or sink in cunning secret.
Again and again, old memories threatened, the most agonizing and excruciating bits of recollection drifted at me--my Father, crazed and dying, tearing the plastic tube from his nose, and pushing the nurse away ... all these images came as if flung in the wind. I shook my head. I looked around me. Then the full fabric of the present wanted to enwrap me.
I refused it.
I thought again very specifically of him, the ghost, refurbishing in my imagination his slender tall figure and the violin which he had held, and trying as best as my unmusical mind could do to recall the melodies he'd played. A ghost, a ghost, you have seen a ghost, I thought.
I walked and walked, even though my shoes were wet and finally soaked, and the rain came heavy again, and the car came round, and I told it to go away. I walked. I walked because I knew as long as I walked, neither memory nor dream could really take hold of me.
I thought a lot about him. I remembered everything that I could. That he had worn the common formal clothes you pick up in the thrift shops more easily than casual or fashionable clothes; that he was very tall, at least six foot three I calculated, remembering how I had looked up at him, though at the time I had not been very dwarfed or in any way intimidated.
It must have been after midnight when I finally came back up the front steps, and heard, behind me, the car sliding before the front curb.
Althea had a towel in her hands.
"Come in, my baby," she said.
"You should have gone to bed," I said. "You seen my fiddler? You know, my musician friend with his violin?"
"No, ma'am," she said, drying my hair. "I think you run him off for good. Lord knows, Lacomb and I were ready to break down that door, but what you got to do you did. He's gone!"
I took off the raincoat and entrusted it to her, and went up the stairs.
Karl's bed. Our upstairs room, ever illuminated by the red light of the florist across the street through lace and lace and lace.
A new mattress and pillows, of course, no indent of my husband here, no last bit of hair to find. But the delicate carved wooden frame in which we'd made love, this bed he'd bought for me in those happy days when buying things for me had been such pleasure for him. Why, why, I had asked, was it so much fun? I had been ashamed that fine carved furniture and rare fabric had made me so happy.
I saw the fiddler ghost distinctly in my mind, though he was not here. I was alone in this room as a person can be.
"No, you're not gone," I whispered. "I know you're not."
But then why shouldn't he be? What debt had he to me, a ghost I'd called names and cursed? And my late husband burnt up even three days ago. Or was it four?
I started to cry. No sweet smell of Karl's hair or cologne lingered in this room. No smell of ink and paper. No smell of Balkan Sobranie, the tobacco he would not give up, the one my first husband Lev always sent him from Boston. Lev. Call Lev. Talk to Lev.
But why? What play did it come from, that haunting line?
"But that was in another country; And besides, the wench is dead."
A line from Marlowe that had inspired both Hemingway and James Baldwin and who knows how many others....
I began to whisper a line from Hamlet to myself, "... 'the undiscover'd country from whose bourn no traveler returns.' "
There came a welcome rustling in the room, the mere stir of the curtains and then those creaks and noises in the floor of this house which can be brought merely by a shift of the breeze against the dormers of this attic.
Then quiet came. It came abruptly, as if he'd come and gone, dramatically, and I felt the emptiness and the loneliness of the moment unbearably.
Every philosophical conviction I'd ever held was laid waste. I was alone. I was alone. This was worse than guilt and grief and maybe was what ... no, I couldn't think.
I lay down on the new white satin spread and searched for an utter blackness of body and soul. Shut out all thoughts. Let the night be for once the ceiling above, and beyond that a simple untroubled sky, with meaningless and merely tantalizing stars. But I could no more stop my mind than my own breath.
I was terrified my ghost had gone away. I'd driven him away! I cried, sniffling and wiping my nose. I was terrified that I'd never see him again, never, never, never, that he was gone as certainly as the living go, that I'd cast this monstrous treasure to the wind!
Oh, God, no, not so, no, let him come back. If the others you have to keep to yourself for all Time, I understand and always have, but he's a ghost, my God. Let him return to me....
I felt myself drop below the level of tears and dreams. And then ... what can I say? What do we know when we know and feel nothing? If only we would wake from these states of oblivion with some certain sense that there was no mystery to life at all, that cruelty was purely impersonal, but we don't.
For hours, that was not to be my concern.
I slept.
That's all I know. I slept, moving as far away from all my fears and losses as I could, holding one desperate prayer. "Let him come back, God."
Ah, the blasphemy of it.
7
THE FOLLOWING day, the house was full of people. All doors were opened so that the two front parlors flanking the wide front hall were in clear view of the long dining room, and people could flow easily over the varied carpets, talking in cheerful voices as New Orleans people do after a death, as if it were what the dead person wanted.
A little cloud of silence surrounded me. Everybody thought I was mentally taxed, shall we say, having spent two days with a dead body, and then there was the question of slipping out of the hospital without a word, for which Rosalind was being blamed again and again by Katrinka, as if Rosalind had in fact murdered me when nothing could have been further from the truth.
Rosalind, in her deep drowsy voice, asked repeatedly if I was all right, to which I said repeatedly yes. Katrinka talked about me, pointedly, with her husband. Glenn, my beloved brother-in-law and husband of Rosalind, seemed a broken thing, hurt deep by my loss yet unable to do anything but stand rather close to me. I thought musingly to myself of how much I loved them, Rosalind and Glenn, childless, the keepers of Rosalind's Books and Records, where you could find Edgar Rice Burroughs in paperback or a song on a 78 disk recorded by Nelson Eddy.
The house was warm and sparkling, as only this house could sparkle, with its many mirrors and windows and a view in all directions. That was the great genius of this cottage, that, standing in the dining room as I did, you could look through open doors and windows to all four points of the compass, though they were tangled up with tre
es and the gusty afternoon. It was so lovely to have made a house of such openness.
A big supper was ordered. Caterers came, whom I knew. Some woman famous for a chocolate pie. And there was Lacomb with his hands behind his back looking sneeringly at the black bartender in his suit. Lacomb would make friends with him, however. Lacomb made friends with everybody, at least everybody who could understand him.
At one point, he slid up to me so silently I was startled. "You want something, boss?"
"No," I said, throwing him a little smile. "Don't get drunk too soon."
"Boss, you're no fun anymore at all," he said, slipping away with his own sly smile.
We gathered around the long narrow oval table.
Rosalind, Glenn, as well as Katrinka, her two daughters and her husband, and many of our cousins ate lustily, carrying their plates about, because there were far too many for the chairs. My people mingled easily with the gregarious Wolfstan family.
Karl had begged these relatives not to visit him during his final months. Even when we married, he knew he was sick, and he had wanted it to be private. And now with his mother already gone back again to England, and everything settled and done, these Wolfstans--all of them rather shiny-faced agreeable people of clear German descent--looked a bit surprised at things--a dazed kind of surprise as when you are awakened out of deep sleep, but nevertheless they were at home among all the fine furniture Karl had bought for me--the cabriole-legged chairs, the pearl-inlay tables, the desks and chests of intarsia made up of tortoiseshell and brass, and the timeworn genuine Aubusson rugs, so thin beneath our feet that they seemed sometimes made of paper.
It was all Wolfstan style, this luxury.
They all had money. They had always owned houses on St. Charles Avenue. They were descended from the rich Germans who migrated to New Orleans before the Civil War, and made big money in cigar factories and in beer, long before all the ragged Potato Famine crew hit our shores, the starving Irish and Germans who were my ancestors. These Wolfstan people had blocks of property in key places, and owned the leases on old stores and businesses.
My cousin Sarah sat staring at her plate. She was the youngest grandchild of Cousin Sally, in whose arms my mother had died. I had no mental picture of it. Sarah hadn't even been born then. Other Becker cousins, and those of mine with Irish names, looked a bit baffled among this careful splendor.
The house seemed poignantly beautiful to me all during the afternoon. I kept turning to catch the reflection of the entire crowd of us in the big mirror along the dining room wall, the mirror which is in a direct line with the front door, and does embrace for all practical purposes the entire party.
The mirror was old; my Mother had loved that mirror. I couldn't stop thinking about her, and it occurred to me several times that she had been the first person I'd really hurt and failed, not Lily. I'd made an error in calculation, a terrible error, the error of a lifetime.
I sat deep in thought, sometimes whispering absolute nonsense to people just to make them stop talking to me.
I couldn't get it out of my mind, my Mother leaving this house on that last afternoon--taken by my Father against her will to stay with her Irish godmother and cousin. She hadn't wanted to be shamed. She'd been drunk for weeks and weeks, and we couldn't stay with her then because Katrinka, a child of eight, had suffered a burst appendix and was, technically, though I never knew it then, dying at Mercy Hospital.
Katrinka didn't die of course. I wonder sometimes if the fact that she missed our Mother's death completely--that it happened during such a long illness when she was locked away--I wondered if that alone didn't make her warped, and eternally doubtful of everything. But I couldn't think about Katrinka. Katrinka's insecurities I wore around always like a heavy necklace. I knew what she was whispering about in the corners of the rooms. I didn't care.
I thought of my Mother, being taken down the side path out to Third Street by my Father, and begging him not to make her go to these cousins. She hadn't wanted her beloved Cousin Sally to see her as she was. And I had not even gone to tell her goodbye, to kiss her, to say anything to her! I'd been fourteen. I don't even know why I was walking up the path at that moment when he took her out. I couldn't get it straight, and the horror of it kept thudding in on me, that she'd died with Sally and Patsy and Charlie, her cousins, and though she loved them and they loved her, there had not been one single one of us with her!
I felt I was going to stop breathing.
People meandered about the sprawling cottage. They went out the open windows onto the porches. It seemed a lively and lovely thing, this delayed coming together for my sake, because that is what I supposed it was. I rather enjoyed the glow of the polished highboys and velvet high-back chairs which Karl had strewn everywhere.
Karl had bequeathed a highly polished surface to the old parquet, with coats and coats of lacquer, beneath the overwhelming Baccarat chandeliers that my Father had refused to sell in the old days, even when "we had nothing."
Karl's silver had been brought out for the meal. Our silver, I suppose I should say, as I was his wife, and he had bought this pattern for me. It is called Love Disarmed and was first made by Reed & Barton sometime very early in the century. An old company. An old pattern. Even the new pieces were finely etched because it had fallen from grace with brides somewhere along the line. You could buy it new or old. Karl had trunks of it that he had collected.
It is one of the few silver patterns that features an entire figure, in this instance a beautiful nude woman on each item, no matter how small or how large, of sterling.
I loved it. We owned more of it than we had ever used, because Karl collected it. I wanted to say something to them--about perhaps each taking a piece in remembrance of Karl, but I didn't.
I ate and drank only because when you do this, you have to talk less. Yet to take food at all seemed a monstrous betrayal.
I'd felt that keenly after my daughter Lily's death. After we'd buried her in Oakland, in St. Mary's Cemetery, a faraway and unimportant place, way away from here, we'd gone with my Mother-and Father-in-Law, Lev's parents, to eat and drink and I had almost choked on the food. I remembered distinctly, the wind had begun to blow, and trees to thrash, and I couldn't stop thinking of Lily in her coffin.
Lev seemed the strong one then, brave and beautiful with his long flowing hair, the wildman-poet-professor. He had told me to eat and be quiet, and he carried the conversation along with the bereaved grandparents, and included as well my somber Father, who said little or nothing.
Katrinka had loved Lily. I remembered that! How could I forget? It seemed wretched to have forgotten! And how Lily had loved her beautiful blond Aunt Katrinka.
Katrinka had suffered Lily's death as bad as anyone could. Faye had been frightened by the whole affair of Lily's sickness and death, generous sweet Faye. But Katrinka had been there, there with a knowing heart, in the hospital room, in the corridors, always ready to come. Those were the California years, encapsulated by the fact that we had all eventually returned.
We'd all left our California life in the cities by the Bay, and drifted either home or away. Faye was gone now, no one knew where, and perhaps forever.
Even Lev had left California finally, long after he had married Chelsea, his pretty girlfriend and my close friend. I think they'd had the first child before he went to teach in a college in New England.
I felt a sudden happiness thinking of Lev, that he had three children, boys, that even though Chelsea called frequently and complained that he was unbearable, he really wasn't, and even though he called sometimes and cried, and said we should have stuck it out, I felt no regret, and I knew he really didn't. I liked to look at the pictures of his three sons, and I liked to read Lev's books--slim, elegant volumes of poetry, which were published about every two to three years, to accolades.
Lev. My Lev was the boy I'd met in San Francisco and married in the courthouse, the rebellious student and wine drinker, and the singer of madly improvised
songs and the dancer under the moon. He had only started to teach university classes when Lily got sick, and the truth was he never got over Lily's death. Never, never was he ever the same, and what he had sought with Chelsea was consolation, and with me a sisterly approval of the warmth from Chelsea and the sexuality that he desperately needed.
But why, why think of all this? Is this so different from the tragedies of any other life? Is death more rampant here than in any other sprawling family?
Lev was a full professor, tenured, happy. Lev would have come had I asked him to. Why, last night when I'd been walking on the Avenue in the rain, stupid and crazy, I might have called Lev. I hadn't told Lev that Karl died. I hadn't talked to Lev in months, though a letter from Lev was lying on a desk now in the living room unopened.
I couldn't shake all this. It was like tremors. The deeper I fell into these thoughts, of Mother, of Lily, of my lost spouse Lev--the more I began to recall his music again, the desperate violin, and I knew I was remembering all these utterly unbearable things compulsively, like one forced to look on the wounds of one's own murder victims. This was a trance.
But maybe such trances would always follow death now, as death piled upon death. In grieving for anyone, I grieved for all. And again, I thought, how foolish to think that Lily had been my first awful crime--letting her die. Why, it was perfectly clear that years before Lily ever died, I'd forsaken my Mother!
Five o'clock came. It was shadowy outside. The Avenue became noisier. All the big rooms had about them a more festive look, and people had drunk plenty enough wine that they were talking freely, as people do in New Orleans after a death, as if it would be an insult to the dead to go around whispering like they do in California.
California. Lily out there on a hill, why? There was no one to visit that grave. Dear God, Lily! But every time I thought of bringing Lily's body home, I had this horrible notion--that when the coffin arrived here in New Orleans, I would have to look in it. Lily, dead before her sixth birthday, had been buried for over twenty years. I couldn't imagine such a sight. An embalmed child covered in green mold?