Just you and me now, Julien, Michael thought.
It was quiet in the house.
Hamilton had gone home to pay some bills. Bea would return later. Only one nurse was on duty because all the money in the world could not procure another, such was the shortage. A nurse’s aide, very capable, was upstairs in Aunt Vivian’s room going into her third quarter hour on the phone.
He could hear the rise and fall of the woman’s voice.
He stood in the living room, looking out into the side yard. Darkness. Cold. Remembering. Drums of Comus. A man smiling in the darkness. Suddenly Michael was a small child again, and would never know what it meant to be strong or to be safe. Fear had kicked in the door of childhood. Fear had laid waste the safety that had been Mother.
Drums and torches on Mardi Gras Night struck terror. We die when we get old. We are no more. No more. He tried to imagine himself dead. A skull in the earth. This thought had come to him often in his life. I will be that way someday, absolutely. It is a certainty, one of the few in my life. I will be dead. I may be a skull in the earth. I may be a skull in a coffin. I don’t know. But I will die.
It seemed the nurse’s aide was crying. Not possible. There was the soft vibration of steps. The front door closed. That was all so far away from him, people coming, going. If she took a turn for the worse, they’d shout his name.
And he’d run upstairs, but why? To be there when the breath left her. To hold her cold hand. To lay his head on her breast and feel the last of the warmth in her. How did he know it would be like that? Had anyone ever told him? Or was it just that her hands were getting colder and colder and suffer and suffer, and when he looked at her nails, her pretty clean nails, they were faintly blue.
“We will not manicure them,” the nurse had said. “You can scrap that part of the plan. We have to be able to see their color. It has to do with oxygen. She was a beautiful woman.”
Yes, you said that before. But she hadn’t. It had been the other nurse who had said it. How many other insensitive things had they said?
The movement of the dark trees outside chilled him. Chilled him to look at it. He didn’t want to be here, staring out the window in the cold empty side yard. He wanted to be warm and be with her.
He turned around and walked slowly back across the double parlor, beneath the cypress arch, a beautiful ornamental thing. Maybe he should read to her, softly, so that she could tune it out if she hated it. Maybe play the radio for a while. Maybe play Julien’s Victrola. That mean nurse who didn’t like the Victrola was no longer here.
He could send the nurses out of the room, couldn’t he? Gradually it had been penetrating to him. Do we need these nurses?
He saw her dead. He saw her gray and cold and finished. He saw her buried, more or less. Not the whole detailed picture, step by step, and strewn over time. Just the concept, in a flashing light-a coffin sliding into a vault. Like Gifford. Only it was here, their cemetery on the edge of the Garden District, and he could walk over there any day, and lay his hand on the slab of marble that was only four or five inches from her soft dark blond hair. Rowan, Rowan.
Remember, mon fils.
He turned. Who had said this? The great long hall was hollow and empty and slightly cold. The dining room was altogether dark. He listened, not for real sounds, but for supernatural ones, for the voice again. Remember, yes, I will.
“Yes, I will,” he said.
Silence. All around him silence, wrapping up his spoken words and making them loud. Making them sharp in the stillness, like a movement, like a drop in temperature. Silence.
There was absolutely no one about. No one in the dining room. No one visible at the top of the stairs. He could see Aunt Vivian’s room was no longer lighted. No one talking on the phone. Empty. Darkness.
And then it penetrated to him. He was alone.
No, couldn’t be. He walked to the front door and opened it. For one moment, he could not take it in. No one at the black iron gate. No one on the porch. No one across the street. Just the solemn empty silence of the Garden District, deserted as a ruined city beneath the motionless street light, the soft clumps of oak leaves. The house as still and undisturbed as it had ever been the first time he saw it.
“Where are they?” He felt the sudden thrust of panic. “Christ, what’s going on?”
“Michael Curry?”
The man was standing to his left. In the shadows, almost invisible, except for his blond hair. He came forward. He must have been two inches taller than Michael. Michael looked into his pale eyes.
“You sent for me?” the man asked softly, respectfully. He extended his hand. “I’m sorry, Mr. Curry.”
“Sent for you? What do you mean?”
“You had the priest call the hotel for me, you asked that I come. I’m sorry it is over.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Where are the guards who were here? Where is the watchman who was at the gate? What happened to everybody?”
“The priest sent them away,” said the man gently. “As soon as she died. He told me on the phone that he was sending them away. That I was to come and wait here, by the door, for you. I’m sorry she’s dead. I hope she knew no pain or fear.”
“Oh no, I’m dreaming. She’s not dead! She’s upstairs. What priest? There’s no priest here! Aaron!”
He turned, staring into the deep darkness of the hallway, for a moment unable to make out the red carpet of the stairs. Then he bolted, taking the flight in one bound after another, and rushing to her closed door.
“Goddamnit, she didn’t die. She didn’t. They would have told me.”
When he felt the knob, and realized he couldn’t open it, he was about to ram it with his shoulder. “Aaron!” he shouted again.
A click inside. The little lock turning. The door popping back, just a little as if of its own accord. Doors all have their own pace and rhythm, their own way of opening or closing. Doors in New Orleans are never neat or efficient about it. In summer this door would swell up and scarcely close. Now it danced open.
He stared at it, at the white wooden panels. Inside the candles gleamed as before. Flicker on the silk of the tester, on the marble fireplace.
Aaron was speaking to him. Aaron said a name behind him. It sounded Russian. And the blond man said softly:
“But he asked for me, Aaron. He called me. The priest told me. He asked that I come.”
He walked into the room. The candles were the only light. They were blazing on the little altar, and the Virgin’s shadow rose up the wall, jittering and dancing as before. Rowan lay in the bed; her breasts rose and fell beneath the pink satin of the new gown they’d put on her. Her hands curled inward. Her mouth was open. He could hear her breathing. She was alive. Unchanged.
He fell on his knees next to the bed; he laid his head down on it, and he cried. He took her cold hand and squeezed it, and felt its pliancy, and what tiny bit of human warmth was actually there. She was alive.
“Oh, Rowan, my darling, my darling,” he said. “I thought…” And then he sobbed like a child.
He just let the sobs come out slowly. He knew Aaron was near him. And he knew the other man was there too. And then slowly he looked up and he saw the figure standing at the foot of the bed.
The priest. The thought sprang from him instantly when he saw the old-fashioned cassock of black wool, and the white Roman collar, but it was no priest.
“Hello, Michael.”
Soft voice. Tall as they had said he was. Hair long and black and over his shoulders, beard and mustache beautifully groomed and gleaming, a sort of horrid Christ or Rasputin, with his blanched and tearstained face.
“I too have been weeping for her,” the man said in a whisper. “She is near death now; she will bear no more; she will love no more; only a little milk was left in her; she is all but gone.”