I sighed. Everything was getting brighter.
"Angel of God," I whispered, "my guardian dear, to whom God's love commits me here.
Suddenly I saw them clearly around me.
"Oh, I'm sorry," I said, "I'm so so sorry . . . I am so very sorry for all this, I . .
. I'm sorry. " I cried. "You can test. Yes, test. Do what has to be done. I'm sorry...
I'm so sorry...
I stopped on the front walk.
There were my beloved Althea and Lacomb at the gate, and they were so concerned. Maybe all these white people-doctor, lawyer, lady in gray shoes-held them back.
Althea made a lip as if she would cry, her heavy arms folded, and she tilted her head.
Lacomb said in his deep voice, "We're here, boss."
I was about to answer.
But I saw something across the street.
"What is it, honey?" Grady said. Lovely to uch of Mississippi in his accent.
"That's the violinist." Just a distant figure in black, far across both sides of the Avenue, and half his way down the Third Street block towards Carondelet, glancing back.
Now he was gone.
Or at least the traffic and the trees had made him seem to disappear. I'd caught him though, distinct for a second, holding his instrument, this strange watchman of the night, glancing back and walking with those great even strides.
I got into the ambulance and lay down on the stretc her, which is not apparently the normal way it is done, because it was rather awkward, but we did it that way, obviously because I began to climb in the ambulance before anyone could stop me. I covered up with the sheet and closed my eyes. Mercy Hospital. All my aunts who had been nuns there for so many years were gone. I wondered if my vagabond fiddler would be able to find Mercy Hospital.
"You know that man's not real!" I woke with a shock. The ambulance was moving into traffic. "But then... Rosalind, and Miss Hardy. They heard him."
Or was that too a dream in a life where dream and reality had woven themselves so tight that one inevitably triumphs over the other?
Chapter 4
It was three days of sleepless hospital sleep, thin and filled with annoyances and horrors.
Had they cremated Karl yet? Were they absolutely sure he was dead before they put him in that horrible furnace? I couldn't get this question out of my mind. Was my husband ashes?
Karl's mother, Mrs. Wolfstan, back from England, cried and cried by my bed that she had left me with her dying son. Over and over I told her that I had loved taking care of him, and that she must not worry. There was a beauty in the birth of the new child, so close to Karl's death.
We smiled at pictures of the new baby born in London. My arms ached with needles. A blur.
"You'll never never have to worry about anything again," Mrs. Wolfstan said.
I knew what she meant. I wanted to say thank you, that Karl had once explained it all, but I couldn't. I started to cry. I would worry again. I would worry about things that Karl's generosity could not alter.
I had sisters to love and lose. Where was Faye?
I had made myself ill-a person drifting for two days with no more than gulps of soda and occasional slices of bread could create in herself an irregular heartbeat.
My brother-in-law Martin, Katrinka's husband, came and said she was so concerned, but just couldn't set foot in a hospital.
The tests were run.
In the night I woke sharply, thinking, This is a hospital room, and Lily is in the bed.
I'm sleeping on the floor. I have to get up and see if my little girl is all right. And there came one of those broken-glass-shard memories so abrupt it drew all my blood-I had come in out of the rain drunk and looked at her lying there on the bed, five years old, bald, wasted, almost dead, and burst into tears, a flood of tears.
"Mommie, Mommie, why are you crying? Mommie, you're scaring me!"
How could you have done that, Triana!
Some night, high on Percodan and Phenergan and other opiates to make me calm and make me sleep, and to make me stop asking stupid questions as to whether the house was locked and safe, and what had become of Karl's study of St. Sebastian, I thought the curse of memory is this: Everything is ever present.
They asked if they could call Lev, my first husband. Absolutely not, I said, don't you dare bother Lev. I'll call him. When I want to.
But drugged I couldn't really go down.
The tests were run again. I walked and walked one morning in the hall until the nurse said, "You must go back to bed."
"And why? What is wrong with me?"
"Not a damned thing," she said, "if they'd stop shooting you full of tranquilizers.
They have to taper them off."
Rosalind put a small black disk player by my bed. She put the earphones on my head, and softly came the Mozart voices-the angels singing their foolishness from Cosi Fan Tutte. Sweet sopranos in unison.
I saw a movie in my mind's eye. Amadeus. A vivid marvelous film. I saw this movie in which the evil composer Salieri, admirably played by F. Murray Abraham, had driven to death a laughing, childlike Mozart. There had been a moment when, in a gilded, velvet-lined theater box, Salieri looked down upon Mozart's singers and the little cherubic and hysterical conductor himself; and the voice of F. Murray Abraham had said: "I heard the voice of the angels."
Ah, yes, by God. Yes.
Mrs. Wolfstan didn't want to leave. But all was done, the ashes in the Metairie Mausoleum, and every test on me had been negative for HIV, for anything really. I was the picture of health and had lost only five pounds. My sisters were with me.
"Yes, do go on, Mrs. Wolfstan, and you know I loved him. I loved him with all my heart, and it never had anything to do with what he gave me or anyone."
Kisses, the smell of her perfume.
Yes, said Glenn. Now, stop going over it. Karl's book was in the hands of the scholars Karl had designated in his will. Thank God, no need to call Lev, I thought. Let Lev be with the living.
Everything else was in Grady's hands, and Althea, my beloved Althea, had gone right to work on the house, and so had Lacomb, polishing silver for "Miss Triana." Althea had my old bed on the first floor in the big northerly room all full of nice pillows the way I liked it.
No, the Prince of Wales marriage bed upstairs had not been burnt! No, indeed.
Only the bedding. Mrs. Wolfstan had had the charming young man from Hurwitz Mintz come out with new pillows of watered silk and comforters of velvet and create a new band of scalloped moire' from the wooden canopy.
I'd go home to my old room. My old rice bed, with the four-posters carved with rice, the symbol of fertility. The first-floor bedroom was the only real bedroom the cottage had.
Whenever I was ready.
One morning I woke up. Rosalind slept nearby. She dozed in one of those big sloping, dipping wooden-handled chairs they give in hospital rooms for the vigilant family.
I knew four days had passed, and that last night I'd eaten a full meal and the needles felt like insects in my arm. I pulled back the tape, removed the needles, got out of bed, went to the bathroom, found my clothes in the locker and dressed completely before I woke Rosalind.
Rosalind woke dazed, and dusted the cigarette ashes off her black blouse.
"You're HIV negative," she said at once, as if she'd been just dying to tell me and couldn't remember that everyone already had, staring wide eyed through her glasses.
Dazed. She sat up. "Katrinka made them do everything but remove one of your fingers."
"Come on," I said. "Let's get the hell out of here.
We hurried down the hall. It was empty. A nurse passed who didn't know who we were or didn't care.