But again, this was making pictures. You couldn’t be sure they were any more than imagination, especially when you’d heard the stories all your life as Mona had, and dreamed so many strange dreams. Gifford sobbing at the kitchen table at Amelia Street. “That house is evil, evil, I tell you. Don’t let Mona go up there.”
“Oh, nonsense, Gifford, she wants to be the flower girl in Rowan Mayfair’s wedding. It’s an honor.”
It certainly had been an honor. The greatest family wedding ever. And Mona had loved it. If it hadn’t been for Aunt Gifford watching her, Mona would have made a sneaky search of the whole First Street house that very afternoon, while everyone else swilled champagne and talked about the wholesome side of things, and speculated about Mr. Lightner, who had not yet revealed his history to them.
But Mona would not have been in the wedding at all if Ancient Evelyn had not risen from her chair to overrule Gifford. “Let the child walk up the aisle,” she had said in her dry whisper. She was ninety-one years old now. And the great virtue of almost never speaking was that when Ancient Evelyn did, everybody stopped to listen. If she wasn’t mumbling, that is.
There were times when Mona hated Aunt Gifford for her fears and her worry, the constant look of dread on her face. But nobody could really hate Aunt Gifford. She was too good to everybody around her, especially to her sister, Alicia, Mona’s mother, whom everyone regarded as hopeless now that she’d been hospitalized three times for her drinking and it hadn’t done any good. And every Sunday without fail, Gifford came to Amelia Street, to clean up a bit, sweep the walk, and sit with Ancient Evelyn. She brought dresses for Mona, who hated to go shopping.
“You know you ought to dress more like a teenager these days,” Gifford had volunteered only a few weeks ago.
“I like my little-girl dresses, thanks,” said Mona, “they’re my disguise. Besides if you ask me, most teenagers look tacky. I wouldn’t mind looking corporate, but I’m a bit short for that.”
“Well, your bra cup is giving you away! It’s hard to find you sweet cotton frocks with enough room in them, you know.”
“One minute you want me to grow up; the next minute you want me to behave. What am I to you, a little girl or a sociological problem? I don’t like to conform. Aunt Gif, did it ever occur to you that conformity can be destructive? Take a look at men today on the news. Never in history have all the men in a nation’s capital dressed exactly alike. Ties, shirts, coats of gray. It’s appalling.”
“Responsibility, that’s what I’m talking about. To dress your age and behave your age. You don’t do either, and we’re talking about two contrary directions of course. The Whore of Babylon with a ribbon in her hair just isn’t your garden-variety teenage experience.”
Then Gifford had stopped, shocked that she’d said that word, whore, her cheeks flaming, and her hands clasped, her bobbed black hair falling down around her face. “Oh, Mona, darling, I love you.”
“I know that, Aunt Gif, but please for the love of God and all we hold sacred, never refer to me as garden-variety anything, ever again!”
Mona knelt on the flagstones for a long time, until the cold started to bother her knees.
“Poor Antha,” Mona whispered. She stood up, and once again smoothed her pink dress. She brushed her hair back off her shoulders, and made sure that her satin bow was still properly pinned to the back of her head. Uncle Michael loved her satin bow, he had told her that.
“As long as Mona has her bow,” he’d said this evening, on the way to see Comus, “everything is going to be all right.”
“I turned thirteen in November,” she’d told him in a whisper, drawing near to hold his hand. “They’re telling me to turn in my ribbon.”
“You? Thirteen?” His eyes had moved over her, lingering just for a split second on her breasts, and then he had actually blushed. “Well, Mona, I didn’t realize. But no, don’t you dare stop wearing that ribbon. I see that red hair and the ribbon in my dreams.”
Of course he meant all this poetically and playfully. He was an innocent and wholesome man, just really nice. Anyone could see that. But then again, there had been a bit of blush to his cheeks, hadn’t there? After all, there were some men his age who did see a thirteen-year-old with large breasts as just one species of uninteresting baby, but Michael didn’t happen to be one of those.
Well, she’d think a little bit more about strategy when she got inside the house, and close to him. For now, she wanted to walk around the pool. She went up the steps and out along the broad flagstone terrace. The lights were on beneath the surface of the water, making it a shining blue, and a faint bit of steam rose from the surface, though why it was heated, Mona didn’t know. Michael wouldn’t swim in it ever again. He’d said so. Well, Come St. Patrick’s Day, whatever the temperature, there would probably be a hundred Mayfair kids in there. So best to leave the heat on.
She followed the terrace to the far end, near the cabana, where they’d found the blood in the snow, which meant that a fight had taken place. All clean now and swept, with only a little sprinkling of leaves. The garden was still down a bit from the snows of this mad winter, so unusual for New Orleans, but due to the warmth of the last week, the four-o’clocks had come back and she could smell them, and see their tiny little blooms in the dark. Hard to imagine all this covered with snow and blood, and Michael Curry floating under the surface of the water, face bleeding and bruised, heart stopped.
Then another scent caught her-that same strange smell she’d picked up earlier in the hallway of the house and in the front parlor where the Chinese rug used to be. It was faint but it was here all right. When she drew near the balustrade she smelled it. All mingled with the cold four-o’clocks. A very seductive smell. Sort of, well, delicious, she thought. Like caramel or butterscotch could be delicious, only it wasn’t a food smell.
A little rage kindled in her suddenly for whoever had hurt Michael Curry. She’d liked him from the moment she laid eyes on him. She’d liked Rowan Mayfair too. She’d longed for moments alone with them to ask them things and tell them things, and especially to ask them to give her the Victrola, if they could find it. But those opportunities had never come.
She knelt down on the flags now as she had done before. She touched the cold stone that hurt her bare knees. The smell was here all right. But she saw nothing. She looked up at the dark servants’ porch of the main house. Not a light anywhere. Then she looked beyond the iron fence to the carriage house behind Deirdre’s oak.
One light. That meant Henri was still awake. Well, what about it? She could handle Henri. She had figured out tonight at the supper after Comus that Henri was already scared of this house, and didn’t like working in it, and probably wouldn’t stay long. He couldn’t quite figure how to make Michael happy, Michael who kept saying, “I’m what’s called a high prole, Henri. If you fix red beans and rice, I’ll be fine.”
A high prole. Mona had gone up to Uncle Michael after supper, just as he was trying to get away from everyone and take his nightly constitutional, as he called it, and said, “What the hell is a high prole, Uncle Michael?”
“Such language,” he’d whispered with mock surprise. Then before he could stop himself, he’d stroked the ribbon in her hair.
“Oh, sorry,” she’d said, “but for an uptown girl, it’s sort of, you know, de rigueur to have a large vocabulary.”
He’d laughed, a little fascinated maybe. “A high prole is a person who doesn’t have to worry about making the middle class happy,” he said. “Would an uptown girl understand that?”